Reflection #5

Hello and welcome to reflection five for this semester’s capstone! At this point in the semester, we have officially completed step four and presented our game at greenlight and we have been selected as one of the seven teams moving forward from semester one to semester two! This makes us the official first horror game to make it past greenlight in Champlain College history!

For this assignment, reflect on how you decide what stays and what goes for the vertical slice (or whatever your final product might be). What factors go into these decisions, and who makes them? Pay particular attention to how different opinions from team members get considered in this process.

We are past our vertical slice phase but during our clean-up/polish phase it was a lot of hard discussion of what is our minimum value product? And what does that look like? We received a lot of strong feedback from Rockstar Games on how to properly implement “Scary” and we spent the week before vertical slice week creating and designing these systems, but not implementing. So we had some hard goals when adding these systems, but as all coding goes, you can create as many puzzle pieces as you want; they may not all fit together.

The factors we used to make this decision are 1) our Designers' visions and 2) Time. We used our designers' vision that they have been formulating over the semester and put it into a single checklist spreadsheet that we used as a guide for the programmers. The second factor is time, as we had limited time before we physically couldn't add more content to the game the programmers had finally say for what could be added with the time we had. Our pipeline would be a meeting between programmers and designers, they discuss whatever is left that needs to be added, the programmers go and implement what remains, then reunite with designers to get the next list of changes. The artists had finished all of their assets so their job was to make sure everything was applied correctly in the scene and help our producer on art for our PowerPoint.

While we put a lot of effort into making sure every member's opinion was heard and everything they expected of our game got added, the programmers ultimately had the final say so there were a few instances where we had to just tell our other members that no, we cannot do what they had suggested.

Thank you so much for reading, the semester is almost over so not many reflections remain!