Yesterday, I hit the milestone of getting a build ready to submit to a game expo. This will be my entering a game I’ve worked on into an event like this, and I’m pretty excited to have a presentable build to show off.
My focus was on having a build that met the following criteria.
- All of the core mechanics in place. There will be room for polish features later, but anyone who picks up the game should get a general sense of what the game is supposed to be. This included
- Movement mechanics for the player
- Single player and co-operative mode
- A UI that can be navigated
- The complete game loop of entering a level, completing it, reaching the and the results, and being able to replay or choose a new one
- No game-breaking bugs. The game shouldn’t be crashing on load, or when taking any basic action expected of players during a game session.
- Levels that sell the idea. There are a number of levels of varying level of quality built so far. Rather than toss in everything I have, I decided to pick out a few that best present the idea of “a team in a relay race”.
- Finalized assets. While most of the UI is still stock assets, the character animations and level assets are mostly complete, giving the project some sense of quality despite being a work in progress.
I was able to close out all of the GitHub tickets I aimed to complete for this mile with a some time for final testing. I actually found a bug in the first version of the build, and the breathing room gave me time to hotfix it and prepare another.
While I wait to hear back about GDoC, the next milestone is to have an improved build to show off at BlerDCon.
Somara Atkinson 