CIS 300: Introduction to Computer Game Design

Two Week Report:
Beta Release

Due: Saturday, April 19th at 11:59pm

Your fourth two week report covers what you did to get ready for beta complete. The report should be two things: a summary of the work that you did in order to finish your game content, and a prediction of the amount of work you will need to do in order to "ship" your game at final release.

First, you need to make a summary of what work went into beta 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 beta complete, you should layout your plans for the finale release. We should not need to explain final release to you. This is the game you expect to show at the GDIAC Showcase. While you can make some changes between your final presentation and showcase, such changes should be treated as "after-market patches". That is, they should only be made for game stopping behaviors discovered after release.

In addition, you should also layout your plans for the (half) week between the release presentation and showcase. This makes this set of predictions (which are the last) two and a half weeks long. 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 (which will be the last). However, you should consider the lessons you learned from beta release in assigning responsibilities for the beta release.

You should submit two files to CMS by Saturday, April 19th 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 beta 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.