Hi,
Today I am going to write about a week between Alpha presentation and last playtesting prior to Beta presentation. Or, shortly – the 5th sprint.
Long Monday
A week before, we just end up with first testing and Alpha presentation, which gave us a lot of feedback from the test players. That Friday was a bit busy, so we skipped a sprint 4 review on that day and decided to move it to upcoming Monday. And there it came – the longest Monday ever, regarding our group meetings.
Sprint 4 review, retrospective, setting the next sprint goal, discussion about it, preparing for the feature freeze and discussion about it, and finally the sprint 5 planning. It took over five hours of brainstorming and it was exhausting.
A lot of features went on freeze from our backlog. Only, this type of freezing meant something else. A no-go.
Instead of having three different types of enemies, we decided to stuck with the only one we had. The long-range attacker. It was a Tar-lady who shoots her vomits at a long distance. After a bit of discussion, we thought we could use that single enemy and change it a little bit, in order to get a melee attacker. So, we just took away it’s vomiting capability, gave it little longer hands with attacking movement, painted it a different colour and, et voila – we had a second enemy unit. A melee Tar-lady.
The list of frozen features goes on; a little girl with the flowers (“No flowers for you at this time of the year …”) [from the concept document, she would throw flowers as range attack]. The gut-eye monster (“Er, it’s going to be as hot as in hell, your eyes might explode too early…”)[from the concept document, his eyes would explode as a ranged attack and then he would keep melee attacking]. The boss from the concept document [a priest] (“Sorry, next time, maybe. We don’t even know how to deal with the bride chasing us all the time”). And so on, and so forth. Of course, to put jokes aside, the real reason behind this was – lack of time. Instead of all these features taking us a time we didn’t have, turning into half-done, we have decided to put more effort into existing ones, and get the best results in our mechanics.
And, it started to show up. From the first playtesting until that moment, we have improved our game tremendously. More colours, sounds implemented for the first time, mechanics improved, etc. But, that will be more explained in my next blog. Until then, stay well and I’ll catch you next time.
Saša Džigurski 
Hello!
The addition of play testing sessions on Mondays have definitely made those days quite longer and exhausting for my group as well, so I can relate to what you are describing. I can also relate to what you wrote about running out of time and having to cut multiple features in the game. What to leave out and what to keep are difficult decisions for a producer to make, but I think it’s smart to focus on the quality of what you already have, as you decided to do. Something that wasn’t quite clear in your post is your thoughts on what caused you to run out of time so you had to leave these features out. Were the team overambitious or too optimistic regarding the time, for example? It would have been interesting to know!
Overall, I believe your post fulfills the requirements of the assignment, though maybe you could have developed the ‘why’ a little bit more. There are some grammatical errors, but they don’t really diminish the value of the post.
As a side note, I also want to mention that I enjoyed your beta presentation and it’s interesting to see another game than all of the Aetherials and Umibozus. 🙂
//Magdalena
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