Week 7 marked our halves presentation which can be viewed below, starting at the timestamp and lasting about 15 minutes.
Despite blocking out plenty of time prior to the day of presentation to practice and iterate upon the slides, there were a number of oversights that lead to the presentation going over relatively poorly. That being said, here were common feedback points for the presentation.
- Lack of a clearly communicated main game loop, minute to minute.
- Threats: other than healing the leviathan, what other threats does the player face?
- Where is the fun? The team did not communicate enthusiasm about the project.
- A general feeling that the team’s lack of clear vision in both design and art is wasting an opportunity to turn a genuinely original high concept into a compelling game pitch.
In general, there were a couple of failure points with this presentation. The most glaring issue was failing to properly prime the faculty about what to expect from the team. In general, by nature of our project we would not expect ourselves to land upon a game concept by halves since we were allowing ourselves to iterate on verbs still. Compared to previous semesters which were expected to conceptualize and prototype the game, our project aimed to be more deliberate about process, which we failed to convey. The team didn’t realize that this was lacking becuase the presentation itself was not playtested to a faculty member not already involved in the project.
While halves left a sour taste in many of the team members’ mouths, it served as an important lesson for the project for the inevitable final presentation.