Presenting the Alpha
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Okay, making a game is one thing, but presenting it to a potential publisher (or just fellow students!), making a great first impression, showing all the cool stuff, gently manoeuvring around what has not been polished yet and keeping it all very succinct is very different. And it usually is very difficult to accomplish. That being said, I enjoyed making the Alpha Presentation of Fear is in me very much despite the fact it wasn’t nearly as significant as trying to convince businessmen to blindly invest big money in your game. It is just our learning experience after all, but that also means we will learn as much as we put effort into it – so why not doing things in the right way? I was the one to make a PowerPoint slideshow, but we as a team discussed everything beforehand and I gather as much input from all the members as possible. We needed to go back in time, to when we scoped the game in the first week, and bring following topics up again: what do we want to do out of the concept? What is our vision? How do we address aesthetic goals? How do we fulfil them? We didn’t put answers to all these questions in the slideshow – what we did was refreshing our memory and refocusing on what we were trying to accomplish – a good game in the first place and a smooth, appealing presentation. As a side note, this kind of retrospect was very beneficial for my group as it allowed us to think of our original objectives. Another part of the presentation – all the things that we were satisfied with, and not-so-satisfied-with, was surprisingly difficult to figure out. Partly because one of the members was insisting that there is nothing to be glad or upset of – that we shouldn’t focus on the result, but on the process and make sure we get the best out of it. At the beginning, the rest of us was resisting his belief, but as we talked more about what he feel good about, we noticed that there’s actually something meaningful there. Finally, we listed some more generic aspects, like group development and Scrum usage as pluses in the project as the result of all of that. However, finding negatives was much simpler – our expectations were too high and bug-fixing was frustrating and time-consuming. Also, time pressure wasn’t something that we could affect, but it definitely played its’ role too. Our goals for next milestone were obvious, because we lacked very important aspect of games of this kind – sounds. Creating good atmosphere that would add some tension was our priority. Besides that, the game was in need of improved visuals and animations. The last part – presenting the gameplay with all we’ve got so far was pretty straightforward. Afterwards, my team left with their head ups knowing they did a good job putting everything together and glad, despite the fact there was still much to improve.  |