Class Hours: 10:05 – 2:40
Mr. Cronin
Notes
- Thursday!
- Tomorrow is Friday the 13th… Didn’t we just have a Friday the 13th?
- Remember that we end up in English after lunch!
- Please remember that the JS Gallery project is to have your own work.
10:05 Attendance
10:10 Skills Production
Game Design Track / Mr. Cronin
Alpha Testing!
Alpha testing is an early stage of game testing where the game is playable enough to try, but still unfinished and likely full of bugs, missing features, placeholder art, and balance problems. It usually happens inside the studio or with a small controlled group of testers – the GAWD students. The goal is to catch major issues before the game is shown to a larger outside audience (this larger outside audience will be our beta testing).
During alpha testing, developers look for things like crashes, broken mechanics, confusing controls, missing content, and whether the core gameplay is actually fun. It is less about polishing every detail and more about finding big problems early. In simple terms, alpha testing is the phase where a game starts becoming a real playable product, but it is still rough and needs a lot of fixing before beta testing.
Each team is responsible for getting a minimum of 13 play testers for your game. Your grade is a proportion of how many testers we get.
- Get 6 of 13 – roughly earn 50% of whatever you earn for this weeks grade.
- Get 13 of 13 – earn 100%.
It is up to the Creative Director of the team to manage the list and get people to your game to play. Just sit at your station quietly and hope? You’re team is going to fail.
Each team has it’s own specific form – make sure that when giving feedback you are choosing the right form. Let’s do a quick spin through the forms…
- Greywood Studios (Maxx and Sylvie)
- Sightless Studios (Lion, Sebastian, and Jacob)
- Agent Flea (Bourdeau, Wyatt and Sawyer)
Game Designers your entire focus this week should be on watching people play your game, talking to them, taking notes, seeing what needs to be improved, and taking that feedback and improving. Feedback will be released when you hit 13 Game Tests.
Your core grade this week is derived from how many “Yes’s” there are vs “No’s”.
10:50 Morning Break (10 minutes)
11:00 Skills Production
11:35 1984
Nineteen Eighty-Four (1984) is a dystopian novel by George Orwell that explores totalitarianism, mass surveillance, and the manipulation of truth through the story of Winston Smith in the superstate of Oceania, ruled by the omnipresent Party and its figurehead, Big Brother.
Read along with Mr. Cronin. Improve literacy, word decoding, enjoy a nice story, and unplug from the world.
11:55 Lunch
- No food in the room / eat in the Cafe.
- You are welcome to return to the room when you have finished eating and work / hang out.
12:25 English
1:10 Afternoon Break
1:25 Speed Design
Speed Designs are 15 minute sprints in GAWD where we practice. It could be any medium – 3D, 2D, video, programming, etc.
1:40 Afternoon Practice & Production
JS Powered Gallery
- folder called “lastNameGallery” and all the assets
DH24: Texturing
- lastNameDH_24.jpg
Week 24 Agency
- lastNameAgency_1.jpg through lastNameAgency_3.jpg
Skills work as well…
2:15 Dailies
2:20 “19 Minutes”
Every day in GAWD will end with “19 Minutes” of silent reading. Closing down our day with silent reading provides many benefits:
- Improve Literacy Skills / Reading Stamina
- Create space for a small reading meditation where we can disconnect from the world and get lost in a story
- Unplug
At the end I will 3 students and ask for a 1 sentence explanation of what happened.
2:40 Dismissal
