Postmortems

During the last week of class, we will have game postmortems. These will be similar to the final release presentation in the introductory course, but without the actual game. You have already shown off your game in the previous week and we do not need to see it again before golden master.

Postmortems should be familiar to those of you that took the introductory course. They were part of the golden master presentation at that time. But since the golden master for this course is not an official presentation, we have pulled it out as its own separate thing.

There is nothing to turn in for this presentation, and it is not graded (despite being called an assignment). It is simply an activity for the last week of class.

Table of Contents

Presentation Format

The postmortems will consist of a 4-5 minute slide presentation with minimal class discussion. In the dicussions we will talk about how “things could have been done differently.” We expect all students to be involved in this discussion, not the team members.

Your presentation should be a list of “what went right” and and “what went wrong”. More specifically, you should identify the following:

  • What you wanted to do at the very beginning.
  • What you were actually able to achieve and how it differed.
  • What prevented you from achieving those goals.
  • What you would have done differently if you could do it again.

To give you some idea of the types of questions you should be answering, here are some postmortems for a couple of commercial games. These are clearly essay format, which is not what we want. We just want slides from you with the high-level bullet points. In other words, your slides should look like the bolded parts of these essays and you should talk about the non-bolded parts.

Baldur’s Gate: Enhanced Edition

This is a very recent postmortem for the relaunch of the classic RPG Baldur’s Gate (published in 2000) on tablets and modern OS’s. The sequel to this game (which is in development for tablets by the same team) is considered by many people to be one of the greatest western RPGs ever made.

Rocketbowl

This independent game was the 2005 winner for Technical Excellence at the Independent Games Festival. It is simple and straight-forward.

Oasis

Oasis was the winner of the IGF’s 2004 Game of the Year and Innovation in Game Design awards in the web/downloadable category. It has also been used as a case study in past semesters of this course.

Presentation Schedule

We only have one day to do this. So we are going to do this as fast as we can. If each group takes up 5 minutes, that is 45 minutes for 9 groups. We can do this, but we have to be efficient about it.