Pushing to the Finish -- Week Ending 27 Oct

If nothing else, I've certainly put a ton of hours into the game this week. Fortunately, those hours do, in fact, seem to have paid off. We're almost ready to submit Last March of the Dodos to IGF, in terms of both the quality of our game and the fact that the deadline is only a few days away. I spent the week poring over the backlog tasks that we could reasonably complete for our submission, updating and adjusting as necessary just about every day, and then communicating those needs to the members of our team. I, in turn, grabbed just about anything I could reasonably accomplish along the way, from painting level models to modeling traps and other assets on my own. I took these tasks in addition to my typical expectations: testing the game like crazy, balancing trap costs and effects, arranging the environmental assets inside individual levels, setting up the order of levels, determining win conditions for each, and ensuring that they function properly within the progression architecture set up by the engineers.

Indeed, it has been an incredibly busy week, but seeing the game come together as well as it has is quite satisfying, and it's been fun to to play a real product in which I have invested so much.

To re-iterate for personal records and ease of reading, here's a breakdown of what I accomplished this week:

- Edited, updated, and communicated the feature backlog for our home stretch to IGF submission
- Tested and balanced the game exhaustively
- Tweaked and optimized level models
- Painted level models with final textures
- Applied finished levels into the game's architecture (made them playable in the engine)
- Determined and applied various attributes to the individual levels, including win conditions, Dodos spawned per level, traps available, number of starting traps, etc.
- Modeled necessary assets yet unclaimed by other artists, including the environmental trap (Venus fly trap) and the Dodos' escape point (hot air balloon)
- Again, tested and balanced exhaustively

This is the last entry before IGF submission, so check back next week for my thoughts on the submission process!

- Troy