Beta Release

Your fourth presentation is your beta presentation. The beta demonstration should show off a clearly recognizable (but unfinished) game. Your game should have a clear progression. Usually, this means three different levels of progressive difficulty (e.g. easy, medium, and hard). For games that do not use levels, you need to clearly demonstrate have the game gets harder over time.

While you may still be working on art, we do not want to hear about major future gameplay elements. Anything in your gameplay spec that is listed as “critical” must be finished. After beta, you should not be doing anything but tweaking parameters and making levels from your existing gameplay elements. You can add some “desirable” features, but only if the game with your critical elements is finished with level design and testing. In fact, if you add any new elements at all, we suggest that you take a “snapshot” of your beta release before continuing. Save a copy of that code in some folder that will never, ever be erased or modified.

Table of Contents

Presentation Format

The vast majority (up to 75%) of your presentation should consist of someone playing the game and showing it off to the class. You should have one person playing it while another team member narrates the play; the narrator and player should not be the same person (so that the player can concentrate on playing). The narrator should point out game play elements, challenges, and strategies as the player encounters them. We expect this to be somewhat rehearsed. You should develop a script for this presentation and stick to it (to the best of your player’s ability at the game).

Level Design Ideas

As with all of the presentations, we do want a slide presentation with design ideas.
However, the design presentation will be different this time. We no longer want to see art in your design presentation. Our philosophy is that, from this point forward, any finished art should be incorporated into the game.

Instead, we want you to review your level design ideas. In this slide presentation, we want the following:

  • A brief summary of your design philosophy (as stated in the gameplay specification)
  • At least three basic patterns that you have identified in your game.
  • A composite pattern that combines two or more of these patterns together.

To come up with your design patterns, you should review the level design lesson. You should also consider the feedback you received on the level design communication lab.

Presentation Schedule

So this presentation is a little controversial. We need to fit these in the week that we come back from the wellness days. As you can see from the calendar, that means we need to start presenting on Tuesday. But technically, we are not supposed to make anything due on Tuesday.

But your submission is not Tuesday; it is on Saturday. The presentation is simply when you receive feedback. And you will have been given ample time to work on this before break starts. So we are going to go forward with this, so that we can have playtesting on Friday (if we made playtesting on Tuesday that would be WORSE than a presentation, as you would need to make a deliverable).

With that said, we will cut the groups the present on Tuesday a little slack (And we are only doing two groups on that day). And all these groups will be guaranteed later days for the final release.

So that know when to bring your demonstration, the presentation schedule is as follows:

Tuesday (April 27)

Section 201 (11:20-12:10)
  • Spectrophobia (Blue Lizard)
  • Unearther (Grass Jelly Games)
Section 202 (12:25-1:15)
  • Graveyard Shift (Oops! All Programmers)
  • Sisyphus (Squiggly Starfruit Studios)

Wednesday (April 28)

  • Luce (TODO Studios)
  • Somniphobia (Enigmaco)

Thursday (April 29)

Section 201 (11:20-12:10)
  • Change in Charge (Studio Baguette)
  • What the Flock! (Small Red Studios)
  • Bear with Me (Team Octave)
Section 202 (12:25-1:15)
  • free him (A Disgrace)
  • Lucid (Just Wanna Have Fun)
  • HoneyHeist (We <3 Unity)

Submission

Due: Sat, May 01 at 11:59 PM

As before, you are not submitting any software to CMS. Instead, we want you to create a release in your Git repository. Your release should not be a an IntelliJ project. We want a self-contained playable JAR file. Once again, we would like for your release to contain quick README file to help us understand the controls. This will enable us to get you playtesting feedback sooner.

However, this time there is something to turn in to CMS. We want the slide presentation this time, as we always need good level design examples and you do not have a level design document (the design specification precluded the need to collect previous design slides). Convert the slides to a PDF and submit them as levels.pdf to CMS.

In addition, you should not forget to turn in your fourth two week report. This will allow us to see how you are organizing you time, and make suggestions for future milestones. Remember to address any issues that we pointed out in your previous report.