Feb

Milestone 3 and 4: The Demo

Yac on February 3rd, 2009

I have set up the next two milestones to help me reach the goal of producing a first-playable demo.

For Milestone 3, I will produce a full demo, with the major sub-goals as follows:

Implement the core game mechanics, including controls, goals, progression.
Implement a basic hud.
Produce a complete demo level, with a clear goal and challenges which show off the gameplay.
Completed level art.

There are other tasks implied in that list aside from the obvious game play ones. I can’t go into details about all of them, but to fully support the game mechanics, I will do more work on the tools and the physics support.

So, if I’m producing a demo for Milestone 3, what’s Milestone 4 about? Well, Milestone 4 is pure testing, iteration and polish. Milestone 4 will take the game from a working demo I can show to my friends, to a polished product I can pitch to publishers.

I will still have a demo ready by the end of Milestone 3, but I am not deluding myself into believing that it will be good enough to pitch to anyone. A month of polish will be critical to any potential success.