ID 111x - Project 5: Game Evaluation and Testing

Due date:

• Monday, February 28th, 11:59pm

Motivation

Many of us have at some point played the game with the impossible level, the game that crashed every five minutes, the game with the glaringly superior strategy, or the game with the painfully clunky interface. At some point during one of these unfortunate experiences, it is not uncommon to wonder whether the game's creators had ever actually played the game before shipping it out the door. Many of these pitfalls could have been avoided if the care was taken to more rigorously test these games.

Certainly if we care for the quality of our work and take pride in providing a fun experience to the player then we must take the time to ensure that our game meets certain standards of quality and playability. Unfortunately, many times we find that testing reveals more issues than we have time to resolve. In these cases we must prioritize what to fix based on factors such as what is most important to fix or what is easiest to fix. The purpose of this assignment is for us to put into practice the testing, balancing, and prioritizing that are necessary for eliminating the bugs and honing the "fun-factor" of our games.

Overview

For this project, your group will evaluate and test another group's prototype, providing feedback on how they could improve upon their game. First, you will be judging how well the other group has exhibited their design goals as described in their original documentation. Second, you will be documenting the bugs that you find in the prototype and prioritizing them based on which you think are most important to fix before the prototype is demo'ed to the public.

Details

Your group will be randomly assigned to evaluate and test the prototype of one other group. You will be given the code for their project (.gm6 file) and their final Game Treatment (from Project 1).

For the Prototype Evaluation, you will be comparing the other group's final prototype against their Game Treatment. Your group is to write a short statement (200 to 500 words) on how well the prototype exhibits the potential of the design goals set out in the treatment, with the understanding that the prototype is only a demo of what the game would ultimately be like. Please feel free to be forthright with your critique, as your evaluation will have no bearing on the other group's grade. Qualitative assessment, as well as positive feedback, is also encouraged.

For the Bug List, you are to document as many bugs as you find. For each bug, give it a descriptive title, categorize it as either GAME LOGIC, UI, or ART, give it a priority of HIGH, MEDIUM, or LOW, write a short description of the bug, and finally write a short description of steps that will reliably reproduce the bug. The priority that you assign to each bug should be relative to the other bugs, so that it is clear which bugs should be fixed first (i.e. make sure that you evenly distribute the bugs between HIGH, MEDIUM and LOW priorities).

Submission

One member of each group should submit all materials (Critique and Bug List) electronically via turnin by 11:59pm on Monday, February 28th.

One member of your group will need to upload the files you are turning in to their CCC account on one of the CCC machines (ccc1 to ccc10). While logged into a CCC machine, that member will need to enter the directory where these files are stored and execute the following:

  /cs/bin/turnin submit <course> <assignment> <file1> <file2> ...

where in our case, <course> is id111x, <assignment> is project5, and <file> is the name of your file containing the critique and bug list (or, they can be in separate files).

Once done, you should verify that your files have been entered into turnin by executing the following command:

  /cs/bin/turnin verify id111x project5

Grading

Summary