Alpha Release Report

This two week-report covers what you did to get ready for alpha release. This report has exactly the same format of the previous one. You will have another CATME survey asking how you worked as a group. In addition, you should fill out a short report documenting what tasks were completed and what tasks a proposed for the next milestone.

Again, refer to the example below if you are unsure of how to structure the report. If you received any negative comments about your previous report, you should address those this time. We do not want reports to be revised; we always want to be moving forward. However, we will take off for mistakes that are made twice in a row.

Table of Contents

Progress Report

Your report is divided into two halfs: the progress report and predictions for the next milestone. In the first part, you should begin with a short description of what the entire group did for these past two weeks. Obviously you worked on the technical prototype, architecture specification, and design specification. However, did you do anything else like animation and music? Have you do any playtesting yet?

This description should be no more than a paragraph or two. After this summary, you should begin a more detailed breakdown for each individual on the team.

Activity Breakdown

For each team member you need to create a subsection. At the start of the subsection you should give short description of the primary responsbilities of that team member over the course of this prototype. This needs be no longer than a paragraph.

After this paragraph, provide a table where each row consists of the following:

  • An individual task that the team member worked on or was supposed to work on
  • Whether or not this task was completed, and the data completed if appropriate.
  • The estimate of hours from the previous two week report
  • The actual of the number of hours spent on that task

This is the same format as the previous report, and will be the format that we use for the rest of the semester. Again, this is what the example report does, so you should look at it if you have any questions.

After the table, you should provide the total number of hours that this person worked over this reporting period. Please be honest here. We never count off for not working “enough” hours. However, hours give us an idea of who is being productive and who is not. This allows us to make suggestions for improvement in later milestones.

Milestone Predictions

Once you have finished the report for this prototype, you should layout your plans for the next stage, closed beta. The beta release should be a playable game. It should be something that you are willing to give out to to a few friends (provided they can run them on their devices). Art does not need to be final yet, but you should have several concrete, playable levels. In particular, we would like at least four concrete levels showing how your game progresses in story and/or difficulty.

We do not expect user testing before this release, but you should come with a user testing plan to the presentation. User testing will form an important part of Open Beta and the final release. See the assignment instructions for more details.

As with the progress report, start with a short, overall summary of what you propose to do. Remember to include the promotional video as well as your goals for the beta release. In short, this paragraph should constitute the deliverables for the next assignment.

Activity Breakdown

For each team member, you should describe his or her responsibilities (in detail), as well as how much time the should be spent on each responsibility. Remember that the time that you assign to each team member should add up to about 10 hours a week (e.g. 20 hours over the two weeks). However, there are a lot of things that you are going to be doing over this period time. You should be very liberal in how you count the time spent by each team member; include all of the following:

  • Time spent discussing in group meetings
  • Time spent preparing for the code walkthrough (class presentation of your code)
  • Time spent on the promotional video
  • Time spent on the beta release.
  • Time spent on art or music assets.

In essence, we are asking that you take what you predicted in your milestones and give us a lot more detail for the next two-weeks. In the milestones, we just wanted a prediction of what the entire group will accomplish. In the two-week report, we want a individual assignments and a prediction of the hours that each person will spend on each.

In estimating time spent, we again ask that you organize this information into a table. In each row of the table, you should have the following:

  • An individual task that the team member is assigned
  • The internal (team) deadline for completing this task
  • An estimate of the number of hours that will be spent on the task
  • A priority value for the task; lower priority tasks are optional

In assigning these tasks, you should use what you learned about your group dynamics during previous releases. At this point, we hope that work is becoming more equitable between the members of the team.

Example

The example linked above is an (edited) version of a two-week report submitted by the game Dispossessed in Spring 2015. We have removed the parts of the report that are no longer relevant for this year. What remains is exactly what we are looking for in a two-week report.

Submission

Due: Sat, Apr 02 at 11:59 PM

You should submit a PDF file called report. Again, we ask that the file be a PDF so that we cannot annotate it in order to return it to you with feedback for possible revision. It is fine if you create the document in a program like Microsoft Word, but you should convert it to PDF before submission.