Communication Lab 6
Specification Workshop

Today's discussion should be spent working on your document revisions, and (if you have time) brainstorming for the critique at the end of the week. Both Traci and the TAs will be around to help you, but there is no formal activity this week.

Document Revisions

With the exception of architecture specification (which is still forth-coming), you should have all of your documents back now. We want you to use our feedback to improve the documents When working on your revisions, you should break this up into two parts.

Revisiting Milestones

The very first thing that we would like you to do is to revisit your milestone document. While you are not going to resubmit it, making sure that you have an accurate assessment of future milestones will help ensure that your other documents are up-to-date.

Take about 10 minutes to look over all of your deliverables and tests for assessment. If you do make changes, make them in your Google Doc that you created for your milestones. Again, you are not going to resubmit this, but you need to have a record of your latest decisions.

Revising Documents

The rest of the time should be spent revising your documents. You have four documents so far.

• concept document
• gameplay specification
• architecture specification
• design specification

By now you should have received feedback on all four documents. We suggest that you bring these documents to class so that you can talk to Traci and the course staff about what you can do to address the problems we pointed out.

Level Design Critique

Friday's class is a critique session to help you come up with level design ideas. There is no formal presentation for the day. Technically, you could just make up ideas on Friday. But the more thought that you put into your ideas, the better our critique will be. So if you are happy with your documents and want to spend time preparing for the critique, you may.

Remember that we do not want you to come up with full-featured levels. Right now, we just want you to come up with several design patterns for your challenges. Review the level design lecture if you cannot remember what these are. We would like at least one of those patterns to be a composite pattern on top of a basic pattern.