SIP Blog: Dotting our i’s and crossing our t’s – 7/22/23
Dotting our i’s and crossing our t’s
By Jacob Czerepica, Clark University ’24
This week we took part in the Game Industry Boston demo event at WPI Seaport to show off our games as we begin the final stretch of the program. At the event, we met with industry professionals, local devs, previous SIP teams, and a ton of other people. The games we showcased received a great reception and we also got some advice on them. As we go into the next few weeks, fully aware of the quickly approaching deadline, we have begun to carefully select what targets we want to hit before the project’s conclusion. With that in mind, on the day that followed we began to prepare for switch week, a week where our projects are passed to different teams. All disciplines worked hard to ensure our documentation is clearly understandable so that another group can pick up our project and work on it without too much friction.
The seaport event was an excellent opportunity to meet with people and make some new connections. With a mix of people from previous SIP years, friends of friends, or game developers and game-adjacent workers that just attended their first MassDigi event, it was a great opportunity to show off what we have been working on and the processes we’ve done to get here. Some also offered some great advice for our games but with the limited time we have we have to be careful with anything we add. It was a great night spent talking, sharing our projects, and generally engaging with people.
With only so much time left, we are plotting the final objectives that we hope to hit before Open House and our games officially launch on August 3rd. These mostly relate to finalizing features, making our last adjustments, and occasionally adding a few finishing touches. The end goal is now in sight but we still have a ways to go. Things are starting to finish off and our games are nearing their completion.
In the days to follow, we are going to be engulfed in switch week. During switch week we exchange all of our games with other teams to ensure that our methods aren’t complete madness. This results in us documenting our processes and ensuring that we can clearly convey our methods and reasons. It is important that our project is readable to other people in the discipline during this week so that they can quickly adjust to the new environment. Programmers have been working hard to make appropriate comments with readme files, discussing coding conventions, and other important aspects of their discipline to make our code readable to one another. Artists craft and refine their art bibles and document how they achieved their results. Lastly, design is creating documents to show our processes for designing. We ensure that we show what we made, and why we made it; describing our design intentions, philosophies, and objectives with the various aspects of our game.
Overall, we have achieved some amazing work and we’re not done yet! Everyone is excited to see their hard work pay off and we are beginning to see the pieces fall into place as we approach our end date. It has been an amazing journey so far and as we near the conclusion, I believe every team is going to come out with a fantastic product to share with the world.
