I am happy to report that the TOYS teams met their Beta milestone Thursday, September 27th and gave their final game presentations Monday, October 1st. The requirements for Beta were for each team to complete and present a final, polished game.
The specific requirements that the teams met include the following:
- Final art created and implemented for the Menus and Heads Up Display.
- Final art created and implemented for Particle systems.
- All weapon particle systems implemented (including muzzle flashes).
- All art polished and bugs fixed.
- All gameplay polished and bugs fixed.
- Custom programming features polished and bugs fixed.
- All sounds tweaked and polished.
- All lighting tweaked and polished.
- AI tweaked and polished.
- Functional Beta Installer.
- Final game documents (Game Design Document, Technical Design Document, Level Design Document, Asset and Development Plan, Asset Database, and Art Style Guide are updated to reflect changes made this sprint to the game).
Thursday, September 27th the teams turned in discs with their Beta installer in order to meet the Beta milestone. Over the next few days they proceeded to generate bullet point postmortem documents, practice for the final game presentations, and finish up the creation of marketing materials. On Monday, October 1st they had a presentation similar to the one they gave for Alpha- with each of the four teams presenting for 15-20 minutes on the changes they made during the Beta sprint.
All-in-all the project was a great success. I am so proud of all the hard work that the teams accomplished, especially with the unusual challenges they faced. I will be going into more detail on the challenges and successes in my next blog entry which will be a postmortem for the entire project.