For my Game Production II class, we had to make 1 prototype a week for 3 weeks, choose one of them to work on for another week and create a presentation to tell people why our game should go through Greenlight. Each class has about four teams, with only two of those teams games moving forward by the end of Greenlight. My teams game Your Forever Home was one of the two games to go through so we’ve already started working on getting all the new team members on board and updated with the game and it’s current progress. We’ve looked back at our last 3 prototypes to figure out ways to move forward with the increased team (what was originally 4 members has become 9).

Your Forever Home Concept Art by Sarah Shaw

Looking back I’m not sure which game was our strongest. I think our week 1 game Pogumono was the most finished, while our week 3 game Your Forever Home (which was the one that got through Greenlight) was the most organized. Personally I think my favorite idea was our week 2 game Cat Mafia, but it’s most suited for a 2D style game and we had to go with a more 3D style game.

Pogumono had a lot of art by the end of the week and almost every mechanic had already been implemented and was ready to be used. I’d say we were semi-organized, but it was a little bit messy since everyone was getting back into the flow of how production works and remembering what all the documentation needs. Thankfully since I had used Unity in my final projects for AI and Physics the previous semester, I didn’t have to refamiliarize myself with it which saved us time.

Your Forever Home wasn’t nearly as complete as Pogumono was. We did have a full puzzle available in the prototype at the end, but things like our art wasn’t as far along. However, this was a 3D game (compared to Pogumono which was 2D) and our artist isn’t as comfortable in 3D so it only makes sense we couldn’t get the game to look close to the way we wanted it to yet. We didn’t have time to get in all of our base mechanics, but in a way this has helped with Greenlight as it’s still left a lot to get done for our bigger team to work on. We were more organized this time, and had more of a system in place. Some issues that we had with the first two prototypes were solved with this prototype.

For all of our prototypes, I think I did a good job of trying to keep our ideas organized and moving as well as getting in as much of the game as I could in the prototype. I made sure to try to get things in quickly so the designers would have time to mess with variables and create their demo levels. I wish I would’ve been able to work on Your Forever Home more but due to my other Graphics II and Emerging Languages programming classes, I didn’t have the time. While I think our technical risk assessment documents were ok for a one week prototype, I plan on focusing more on it as we move forward with Your Forever Home and adding a couple of add-ons to help keep code and systems organized.

Cat Mafia Concept Art by Sarah Shaw