This week marks the second week that we have been performing weekly builds of Dawnroot. These builds serve as a way to do integration testing for our game. That is to say, we have all been working on our own pieces of the puzzle in a sort of isolation until now. We started the weekly builds to see how all of our pieces work together, and hopefully find the places that they haven’t. Well, it turns out it is much easier to see what needs doing when you have a “gun to my head we have to release right now this is what we have” game to look at. our first weekly build generated a large list of items to fix, and an even larger list of items to tune. Now, after creating our second weekly build, I’d like to talk about a few things I noticed. First, it is often the little things that make a game feel like a game. Sure a game without movement would be strange, but a game with almost but not quite great movement feels stranger still. Likewise with splash screens and menus. certainly these things should be added as needed for development, and then polished later, but they are more than deserving of time and attention.
