Assignment 11
Technical Prototype

Demo: Monday, March 18th at 10:10 am
Due: Saturday, March 23rd at 11:59 pm

Your second presentation is your technical prototype. Unlike the gameplay prototype, the technical prototype should be an "evolutionary" prototype. The code that you demonstrate for this prototype should find its way back into your final project. That means that a useful thing to have for this prototype would be (nearly) completed character controls with a few challenges to overcome. You can do also do a level-editor if you wish, though we typically delay this to alpha release.

Ideally, you would like your technical prototype to be a solution to a particular problem unique to your game. You should not be able to get away with copying code from the labs (copy code is fine, but it is not the only thing you should do). For example, if your technical prototype shows off the physics, what were the unique challenges that you ran into when designing the physics that differed from lab 4. Is there a graphical challenge that you are trying to solve, such as modeling water? Whatever it is, pick something and make it the centerpiece of your presentation.

Class Presentation

As with the last prototype, your class presentation will consist of two parts. In addition to the software prototype, we are also expecting a (short) presentation from the designers on your team. As designers tend to be left out before alpha (which is the first time teams use assets in earnest), we want to see what they are working on.

Software Prototype

We will have roughly 15 minutes per group, per presentation. We want the bulk of this time (8-10 minutes) to be devoted to showing off the software prototype. This presentation will be very similar to the last one, as we will reserve a lot of that time for questions from the TAs and the audience. As part of your presentation, you should be prepared to answer the following questions:

• What is the technical challenge being addressed by this prototype?
• What is unique about your game that required new, custom software?
• Are there any other technical solutions that might have worked?
• Why did you pick this solution over the others?
• What are your plans for the alpha release after Spring break?

Design Ideas

Your designers should spend no more than 5 minutes of the remaining time with their presentation. For this presentation, we want to see more concrete examples of assets for your game. This can include any or even all of the following:

There are no strict requirements for the designers. We simply want to see early concept art about the game. The presentation can include any or even all of the following.

• Basic animations (rough sketches)
• Basic environment assets
• Background assets
• Game screen mockups

Presentation Schedule

As you can see from looking at the calendar, this presentation will once again take place over two days: the Monday lecture and the Tuesday lab. This is intended to give you enough time to present and answer questions. Later prototypes will be spread over even more days.

On Tuesday, we will just go through the groups during session, and everyone will get a chance to see and critique them. For Monday, we will split the class into two groups (we have figured out how to handle the noise issue). Each section will have three Monday presenters and three Tuesday presenters. The Monday presenters will present to their section. We will have TAs available to moderate the discussion of each group.

Keep in mind that the projector requires either a VGA input or HDMI input, so someone on your team will need to bring a laptop (and adapter if necessary) to present on. If that is not going to work, the please let the instructor know ahead of time.

So that know when to bring your laptop, the presentation schedule is as follows:

Monday (March 18)

• Super Glue Studio (Tower Offense)
• One Fortune Games (Kamachi)
• LUMEN Studios (YoyoBoy)
• 7Studio (Undetected)
• OneWordStudios (Flourish)
• Triton Games (Prism Break)

Tuesday (March 19)

Section 201 (11:15-12:05)

• FlashLight Studios (Amaris: Realm of Dreams)
• Ralph Studios (Starstruck)
• HEDG (Roasted!)

Section 202 (12:20-1:10)

• FXN (Loxodonta)
• The Syndicate (Perceptron)
• Snapback Studios (Clerical Error)

Submission

Due: Saturday, March 23rd at 11:59 pm

As with the gameplay prototype, we ask you to turn in your prototype. This should be a rough snapshot of your game. As this is an evolutionary prototype, it should be in LibGDX this time. Hence we want you to send us an executable JAR, just like you did with the labs.

You should gather the files for your prototype and zip them together in a file called prototype.zip. This zip file should contain everything that is necessary to play your prototype. This usually means the executable and a quick readme explaining the controls. You should then create a Release for us, like you did with the gameplay prototype. There is nothing to turn into CMS.

In addition, you should not forget to turn in your second two week report. This will allow us to see how you are organizing your time, and make suggestions for future milestones.