CIS 300: Introduction to Computer Game Design

Two Week Report:
Alpha Release

Due: Saturday, April 5th at 11:59pm

Your third two week report covers what you did to get ready for alpha complete. The report should be two things: a summary of the work that you did in order to get your game working, and a prediction of the amount of work you will need to do to get to beta complete

First, you need to make a summary of what work went into alpha complete. You should be very detailed. You should submit a report that documents the activities of your team members. For each team member, you should include the following:

  • Exactly what activities the team member was involved in during the development of your game.
  • How many hours over the past two weeks that team member spent on each of those activities
  • An assessment of whether these activities were a valuable use of that team member's time. If they were not, what could that team member have been doing instead?

In addition, you should make comparisons to your projects from your previous two week report. What took more time than you expected? What took less time than you expected? Have you learned any lessons that will alter how you assign responsibilities in the future? This particular feature was neglected by some of you in the last two week report, and I intend to take it more seriously this time.

Once you have finished the report for the alpha complete, you should layout your plans for the next stage, your beta release. 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 all of your game play should be complete. After beta, you should not be doing anything but bug fixing and polishing content.

Again remember that this should add up to 10 hours a week. Obviously, you do not need to assess whether the responsibilities you assign are correct yet -- you will not know this until the next two week report. However, you should consider the lessons you learned from alpha release in assigning responsibilities for the beta release.

You should submit two files to CMS by Saturday, April 5th at 11:59pm:

  • The file report, which contains your two week report. This file may either be a text file (txt), a Microsoft Word file (doc), or a PDF file (pdf).
  • The file slides, which are your your slides from your alpha demonstration. To standardize things, this file should be a PDF file (pdf). If you are using PowerPoint, please use the options available to convert your presentation to PDF.