Gamefests

Towards the end of development my team and I decided to take Gaze of the Abyss to the Champlain Games Festival and the RPI Games Festival. It was our intention to intend this event in order to gain outside feedback on our game while gaining exposure for the project.

Our attendance at The Champlain Games Festival was planned months in advance. Because of this we were able to plan out what features we wanted to be in the game months before the festival. While there was a uptick in work the week before the festal we were able to avoid an intense crunch because of this planning. Unfortunately this was not the case for the RPI Games Festival.

RPI was set at the end of the school's semester. We were asked to give a demonstration of our build to see if we would be eligible to compete or would simply just be demoing our game. At this point my team was stretched thin with work for other classes. This caused a large amount of work to be pushed off or wrongly prioritized in the chaos. Because of this the build had several game braking bugs that cause it to be rejected.

After the presentation our programmers thoroughly examined the build in order to fix it. After a brief examination it was determined that these bugs were easily fixable and were only left broken due to their low placement of priority. One was quoted as saying "It took longer to boot up unity than it did to fix the errors.

These two contrasting experiences showed the importance of planning. While planning can tend to break apart during times of intense stress that is the time when we need it the most. In the future I will strive to put an adequate amount of time in to the panning of each of my projects.