March 31 – April 4, 2014
As we enter the final month of development, we’ve narrowed our ambitions so we can deliver the most polished experience we can. Along these lines, we decided to deliver three, rather than four, courses, tackling our most pressing bugs, and improving the core experience.
When we first pitched our concept, we proposed delivering four courses, assuming we could complete two each week. As we began building new courses and new assets for them, we discovered all that we didn’t know about our pipeline and realized that was unrealistic. Case in point: it wasn’t until this week that we were able to implement our second course into the game.
As our artists and level designers worked on adding an additional level, our engineers worked on continuing to eliminate our biggest technical problems. As we’ve mentioned previously, our game is built on top of an existing code base, which means every feature we add creates bugs in a system that wasn’t built for it.
The features we have added are not the “wouldn’t it be cool if…” features we initially brainstormed, but small improvements that make the game easier for novice players. We introduced a rough version of feedback that displays when players have gone out of bounds, landed in the rough, or changed the world orientation. A preview arc now shows player where their ball will go. These should help players think less about what is happening and why it’s happening and more what they should do next to get a great score.
In the middle of the week, we were able to show off the latest build of our game off to students from the University of Agder in Norway. While unexpected bugs prevented us from using this as an opportunity for a playtest, we took the opportunity to discuss our technology and our methodology. This was great practice for our soft opening, now three weeks away.
In Week 12, we will put our third and final course into an accelerated pipeline so we can meet our target date of delivering rough versions of all courses by April 18. This will let us use our remaining weeks tracking and removing bugs and polishing our courses.