Report 2
Pre-Beta Complete Report

Due: Saturday, April 18th at 11:59 pm

This two week report is going to be tricky, because it has to deal with the discontinuity in the semester. We want this two-week report to cover what you did to get ready for pre-beta release, even though it has been far more than two weeks since your last report.

As we said before everyone left, you are not responsible for any work before April 6. That is the part that will make this document a little tricky. We will address this in the Progress Report section below. But otherwise, this document will be similar to the one you did for gameplay prototype.

Again, refer to the example below if you are unsure of how to structure the report.If you received any negative comments about your previous report, you should address those this time. We do not want reports to be revised; we always want to be moving forward. However, we will take off for mistakes that are made twice in a row.

Progress Report

Your report is divided into two halfs: the progress report and predictions for the next milestone. In the first part, you should begin with a short description of what the entire group has done for this release. Because it has been so long, we want you to separate this report in two parts: work done since gameplay prototype, and work done since returning April 6th.

The latter matters for participation, but we still want an accurate representation of the work that was done on the game. However no one will be penalized for not doing work before April 6. If you did no work during this time, it is okay to say so.

How you split up the sections is up to you. You can have one section with reports for each person before April 6th, and another after. Or you can split the tables for each person. Find something that works.

When you report your work remember to include everything. That means meetings, time working on documents, or even just playtesting (which is more difficult than ever).

Activity Breakdown

Regardless of how you split up the two time periods, you need to create a subsection for each team member At the start of the subsection you should give short description of the primary responsbilities of that team member over the course of this prototype. This needs be no longer than a paragraph.

After this paragraph, provide a table where each row consists of the following:

• An individual task that the team member worked on or was supposed to work on
• Whether or not this task was completed, and the data completed if appropriate.
• The estimate of hours from the previous two week report
• The actual of the number of hours spent on that task

Note that this is different from the previous two week report. Now you are comparing your predictions from the previous report to what actually happened. This is exactly what the example report does, so you should look at it if you have any questions.

After the table, you should total the total number of hours that this person worked over this reporting period (though again, separate hours before and after April 6). Please be honest here. We never count off for not working "enough" hours. Our primary concern is that work is well-balanced between team members

Milestone Predictions

Once you have finished the report for this prototype, you should layout your plans for the next stage, beta complete. Now you are back on a normal milestone schedule, so this should be feasible.

Review the assignment instructions before writing this report. The beta release should be a playable game. It should be something that you are willing to give out to your friends, if not the entire world. Art does not need to be final yet, but you should have several concrete, playable levels. The exact number of levels may depend on the design of your game, but they should be solid and balanced. After beta, you should be focusing on bug fixing and polishing content.

As with the progress report, start with a short, overall summary of what you propose to do. There are no new documents this milestone, but you will be asked to revise previous documents. You should also describe what kind of level you will demonstrate in this release. In short, this paragraph should constitute the deliverables for the next assignment.

Activity Breakdown

For each team member, you should describe his or her responsibilities (in detail), as well as how much time the should be spent on each responsibility. Remember that the time that you assign to each team member should add up to about 10 hours a week (e.g. 20 hours over the two weeks). However, there are a lot of things that you are going to be doing over this period time. You should be very liberal in how you count the time spent by each team member; include all of the following:

• Time spent discussing in group meetings
• Time spent on the level design document
• Time spent on the beta release
• Time spent on art or music assets

In essence, we are asking that you take what you predicted in your milestones and give us a lot more detail for the next two-weeks. In the milestones, we just wanted a prediction of what the entire group will accomplish. In the two-week report, we want a individual assignments and a prediction of the hours that each person will spend on each.

In estimating time spent, we again ask that you organize this information into a table. In each row of the table, you should have the following:

• An individual task that the team member is assigned
• The internal (team) deadline for completing this task
• An estimate of the number of hours that will be spent on the task
• A priority value for the task; lower priority tasks are optional

In assigning these tasks, you should use what you learned about your group dynamics during the gameplay prototype. While tasks may be uneven given the break in the semester, we hope that they even out by the end.

Example

The example linked above is an (edited) version of a two-week report submitted by the game Dispossessed in Spring 2015. We have removed the parts of the report that are no longer relevant for this year. What remains is exactly what we are looking for in a two-week report.

This report is taken from later in the semester, as the team had really gotten into a grove at this point and was submitting excellent reports. As a result, the progress report compares the number of hours worked to the hours predicted. You did not make any predictions before this report, and so this is not relevant. But we want everything else.

Submission

Due: Saturday, April 18th at 11:59 pm

You should submit a PDF file called report. Again, we ask that the file be a PDF so that we cannot annotate it in order to return it to you with feedback for possible revision. It is fine if you create the document in a program like Microsoft Word, but you should convert it to PDF before submission.