Production II Blog | Preparing for Midmortems

Introduction:

With February 15's midmortem presentations only days away, my team VCB (Very Cool Birds) has been working overtime to make sure both our game and presentation are up to snuff. This includes fixing up any major bugs, polishing the mechanics and visuals to a fine point, and implementing several features that were not yet in the game.

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The Game:

Our game is Snowball Showdown (name pending), a competitive, action VR game in which players can live out the greatest and wackiest snowball fight imaginable. Inspired by titles such as Dead and Buried, Snowball Showdown features fast-paced gameplay and a unique crafting system. Players can make a scooping motion with their hands while close to the ground to build snowballs, with the size of the scoop correlating to the size of the produced projectile. They can then combine it with all kinds of wacky things, including other snowballs, rocks, knives, and their neighbor's cat -- each of which has a unique effect!

Snowball Showdown has been in development for roughly three weeks thus far. In that time, we have implemented the following:

• Scooping, picking up, and throwing snowballs

• Snowball physics

• Basic fort-building

• Items: [Rocks], [Knives], [Grenades], and [Cats]

• The ability to produce items and fort-building materials using pre-built snowballs

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Preparations:

The title slide for our Google Slides presentation. Note the cartoony visuals and the cat sticking halfway out of the fort, immediately setting our game's tone.

To make sure our midmortem presentation goes as smoothly as possible, we have all been working on various facets of it over time. Mostly, we have been editing our original presentation to make it more fitting for this big presentation. A lot of these edits include jumbling around information on slides to make them more visually pleasing and to make them flow better, as well as adding cute images to the slideshow. These images show off several items that the player can, theoretically, put inside snowballs, making it clear from the get-go that our team is aiming for a wacky, over-the-top game.

My teammates Wes (left) and Matt (right) working on props for our presentation.

Tonight especially, we put a good deal of time into creating props for a small skit we plan to perform at the beginning of our presentation. In doing so, we hope to inject even more humor into it and get the audience interested in our concept. We will be practicing the overall presentation more tomorrow (February 14, 2019), which is the day before midmortems take place.