Week #12: A late goodbye

Fellow readers,

This report is likely to be my last post on this blog. The writing experience lasted for approximately three months of my life. Just a few days back on the 26th of May, we had the first fully online MOJO event in history; the day was overall a joy. Our team participation involved three components. See players testing our game and giving us direct feedback about their experience. Playtesting other teams' games and watching online streams where the developers and artists of each team talked about their developing experience, their goals, and what they would have done differently.

Our interview was set for 12:30PM, and overall, the conversation went well. We answered the questions honestly and talked about our game very naturally. The only unfortunate part, as mentioned by other colleagues on their blog posts, was that the wrong trailers and gameplay videos were displayed on the event. The trailer presented was a 720p initial draft made by Sofia Santos, and the final trailer was way better. In this trailer, the sound was mastered. The image quality was 1080p, and there were subtitles for people who had trouble understanding spoken English and included some hero shots of our game, including levels that were not used in the event. This happened because of me. With the hurry to deliver everything by the end of the 25th of May, I accidentally submitted the trailer we had stored on GitHub. Instead, I should have provided the version I had stored locally, which could not be uploaded to GitHub because it was larger than 100MB. However, when it comes to the wrong gameplay trailer being displayed, it was the streamers' error. We submitted a way better version at approximately 10:30AM and signaled this at least twice throughout the morning. The improved version better displayed how the game should be played and enjoyed, instead of being a rough speed-run throughout the level. Alas, we are all human. If you are curious you can check the videos below. The first is the final game-play trailer and the second is the final presentation trailer!

Overall, this course and the MOJO event made me learn a lot about game development. Although it gave me lots of hard work and ultimately set me back on my thesis progress, I do not regret it for a single second. I even enlisted as a volunteer for Game Dev Técnico. Wink Wink. I also got to make new friends in other universities, and I am not regularly going out with one of them! For lack of better words, this was a 'game' changing experience! See what happens when game development joins together an engineer and an artist:

Figure 1 - Francisco and Sofia find happiness in each others' company

I wish you all the best,

See you next time.

Finale: '2036' at the MOJO event

The MOJO event is finally past us. It was an incredible experience to try out my colleagues' games and to see my colleagues playing "2036".

A lot went wrong in the MOJO event: our final narrative trailer and gameplay trailer were switched with old versions at the event and the people watching the livestream didn't get to see the game as we wished (the trailers were really cool). But, nonetheless, it was important to hear the feedback.

In all honesty, I haven't looked at the logs we collected from the event, all I know is what the MDJ's students said about our game and the reaction was positive (we still didn't get the mouse sensitivity right though). People seemed to really like our setting and the look of the game. 

Now that we'll be writing the final report, we'll be looking at dozens of heatmaps and forms. I'm actually excited about writing the 'Postmortem' report because, looking back, there's a lot of things we would've done differently  (mostly, balance our ambition).

It was a pleasure writing this blog every friday.

I'll see you soon.