CS/INFO 4152: Advanced Topics in Computer Game Development

Assignment 16
Open Beta Release

Demo: Monday, April 29th at 11:15 am
Due: Saturday, May 4th at 11:59 pm

Your fifth presentation is your "public beta" presentation. This is the real beta. By this point we expect you to have people other than yourself playing the game. So that is our primary requirement for this release. The game should be in a state that someone who has never seen it before can play it (albeit with quite a bit of instruction). Your design presentation will be a report of the lessons that you have learned from this playtesting.

As we said in class, this will be the last formal release before Showcase. We will spend the last week of class playtesting. This will give you two weeks between this release and Showcase to get something presentable. But this means that whatever you show at public beta must be something that we can playtest.

Class Presentation

As with the last release, your class presentation will consist of two parts. The difference is that this time, the "design" presentation will focus on your playtesting research that you conducted during this release.

Software Deliverable

We will have roughly 18 minutes per group, per presentation. As with the last release, we want the bulk of this time (8-10 minutes) to be devoted to showing off the game so far. 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.

Playtesting Presentation

As part of this sprint, we expect you to do formal playtesting and gather data. We are not expecting a lot of analytics. You can playtest with as few as five people. However, we want this to be a formal study. That means we want you to

  • Identify specific lessons (ahead of time) that you wish to learn about your game.
  • Create a playtesting script to study these specific lessons.

  • Distribute (by hand or electronically) your game to playtesters with this script.
  • Gather data by either recording the session or requiring the player to take a survey.
So this suggests the structure of your presentation.
  • Identify what you wanted to learn.
  • Describe how you set-up your playtesting.
  • Describe how you gathered data.
  • Explain what you learned, backing this up with data (quantitative or qualitative).
  • Explain what changes you will make in the final sprint as a result.

Presentation Schedule

The structure for this presentation is the same as the previous ones. As you can see from looking at the calendar, this presentation will take place over the entire week. This is intended to give you long enough to present and answer questions. While we would like you to playtest, this is once again happening in the discussion section. However, we might playtest in class if there is time.

So that you are prepared, the presentation schedule is as follows:

Monday (April 29)

  • Chef Party (Family Style)
  • Winging It Studios (Cluck Cluck Moose)
  • Singularity Games (Dive)

Wednesday (May 1)

  • Beige (Pig Life Crisis)
  • Big Yike Games (Stranger Seas)
  • Sicko Code (Stelliform)

Friday (May 3)

  • Puppy Spirit (Weather Defender)
  • Ravenjack Games (AntAgonist)

As before, you are not submitting any software to CMS. Instead, we want you to create a release in GitHub. This is the policy that we have had all semester.

Once again, we want this to be an executable release. We do not want to have to build your code. For Android, this means an APK built to run on all devices. If you are chosing iPhone as your primary build environment, we want a TestFlight release. Talk to the course staff if you are still having a problem with this.

In addition, this time we would like a copy of your presentation slides. Please submit them to CMS as a PDF. You should also remember to turn in your fifth two week report. This will allow us to see how you are organizing you time, and make suggestions for your final push to Showcase.