GCS Fall 2006 Over!

My first semester as COO of GCS is over. For the first time, no projects were abandoned, and every project had a build to present at the end of the semester. As much as I’d like to credit myself, it couldn’t have happened without the support from GCS project leaders and my fellow GCS officers.

Anticipation is high for next semester. Currently there are a projected 13 people who are interested in leading a project in Spring 2007. Of course, if each one of these 13 projects gets pitched, it will be absolutely beyond our current capabilities in terms of human resources or even the time we have allotted for each meeting. I’m hoping the numbers die down before the semester begins, but in case they don’t, I’ve already begun preparing for the situations that may arise.

I’ll probably post a couple of my favorites from this semester as soon as the pages materialize. Some really good games were developed this semester, games that I’d actually play in my own free time… (!)

GDExercise Two: FINAL ROUND FAILED

I’ve been putting this one off a bit, but as the “news” goes, the game I developed for the Experimental Gameplay Project, Block Step, was basically disqualified for technical difficulties. To quote:

Block Step by sifupeng – Programming and art are top notch, and a puzzle game such as this seems like a fresh new use for a dance pad. It was too bad that controller sensitivity/response/whatever made it almost impossible to control what was happening. We would love to play again given a little more time and tuning!

Sadly, I’m fairly sure my controller input parsing was just fine. Which brings me to a single realization: I completely forgot to provide for in-game directions and/or a tutorial. Assuming that the judges read/understood the readme/design doc was a huge mistake on my part, and in any case, basic design fundamentals dictate that users should not have to read any supplementary material to pick up a game.

From there I can only imagine how easily it is to make assumptions about the underlying gameplay mechanics (the easiest one being having to actually match colors rather than simply having blocks of a color drop when stepped on), and quickly writing it off as a technical difficulty when results don’t match expectations.

Upon further playtesting, subjects seem to have similar experiences to that which I’ve predicted based on the “feedback” from the contest.

In the least, I do believe I’ve learned the value of preliminary user testing. So even though I lost, I suppose I didn’t end up completely empty handed after all. Right?