Team Patpat

This week we worked out a roadmap for how we will spend the rest of the semester. What is more important than the formality itself is the pipeline this roadmap encapsulates. Notice there are 4 categories – ‘System’, ‘Prototype’, ‘Product’ and ‘User’. System means our codebase – the structure of our toolkit. Prototype is us making a game with our own toolkit. Product means the effort put into making PAT more accessible by outsiders. User means how we test and support the product.

The pipeline works like this: we first build our system. In order to test the viability of what we have built, we make prototypes ourselves and find out what is missing or not feeling right. Through making a Castlevania prototype we find out the features required to actually make a game so we add those to the product and see how easy it is for other users to reproduce this game. 

So we decided to name this Penguin Action Toolkit generated Castlevania-like prototype PENstlevania (sorry). To add on to last week’s point of validating system through prototyping and our pipeline defined by the roadmap, we put together an exhaustive list of features we would like to test within this PENstlevania demo.

It is important to make the distinction that for the two-week cycle, none of the features listed are intended to make the prototype ‘fun’ to play. It only serves for our testing purposes for the time being and polishing it into a game slice will be after we have made 2 or 3 prototypes. With this in mind, we are documenting the challenges we faced when using PAT, and of course the good things about it as well. (To be continued in next week’s dev blog).