The Second Milestone

We were well ahead of schedule and managed to get everything printed, bound and burnt on to disc on time for the lesson where we would present our progress to the rest of the class. I was happy with how the GDD turned out, I missed out on my target of 25 pages and only managed to get 24 done. However, I wasn't too worried about it, I feel that it contained everything that was required so should meet the standards needed to get a good grade.

We also handed in the TDD and the Art Bible. Harry had managed to get it all done and after some alterations from Simon we felt it was as good as we were going to get it. Due to it not being ready for the personal deadline we had set ourselves to review everything, we didn't have enough time to make it any better. Simon had the TDD well under control so no worries there.

The presentation went well, we let a member of one of the other groups play our demo and we talked them through the differences from the first prototype. It was in 2D Toolkit this time rather than the 3D version using the regular Unity package so it looked a lot different. Not to mention the tiles and backgrounds we had created for this deadline. Artistically it is fairly close to the final version of the game and this was noted by a number of our peers in the group crit session afterwards. I then talked the group through the design changes since the last milestone. The main focus was on the narrative of the game and we talked about our narrator and the way we'd be using a rhyming narration style along side still image/story board style cut scenes. Phil (as he will play the narrator) gave the group a preview by reading out an extract. In terms of gameplay there hadn't been many changes, the main change in this aspect was the new collectible/ game progression system we have implemented. The player will have to accrue a certain amount of collectibles from a certain number of levels to unlock the next set of levels. We wanted to avoid the whole 'complete a level, unlock a level' style of progression.

We spoke about the evolution of our art assets and about the future of our project as we hit the start of production. Feedback was generally positive and we answered plenty of questions. Our tutor's remarks were also positive and he said that we had given ourselves a good platform to build upon for the rest of the project. I was pleased with this because this is something that we had spoken about and something we had aimed for.

I learned a lot during this milestone and put in a lot of effort to make sure my contributions to the game were good enough. We've learned a lot about ourselves as a team too which has been massively important and could be detrimental if we want our game to be a success.