Project Planning

Learning Intentions

Understand how to plan a digital project such as a video game
Identify media assets required for a game
Approximate how long a game will take to make

Success Criteria

I can create a project plan for a video game
I can identify what assets are required for a video game

Course Overview

A project can only be planned properly if you first know exactly what you need. It is important to create a list of media elements you may require. These might include:
- Text
- Graphics
- Animation
- Audio
- Video

Media assets - examples for simple racing game

Title
Background Music
Level 1 Background
Level 2 Background
Level 3 Background
Playable Character - Red Car
Collectable 1 – Coin
Collectable 2 – Star
Collect Sound

Obstacle - Cone
Crash Sound
Score
Game Over Screen Win
Win Sound
Game Over Screen Lose
Lose Sound
Credits

Try listing some of the media assets from Pacman

Project planning

Project Planning is the process of breaking your task down against a timeline to calculate approximately how much time it will take you to complete your task.
Depending on the size of task this can be broken down into minutes, hours, days, weeks, months or even years!
It is important to consider the Media Assets Creation as well as the Development Time for your project.
Let's look at an example…

Example plan

Project Plan: Media Assets Car Racer

Project Plan: Implementation

As well as calculating the time required to create the Media Assets for your game you will need to consider the time it will take to create your game too!
You must take into consideration your previous knowledge of your software develop package and how confident you are in using it.

Project Plan: Car Racer Implementation

I have a lot of previous knowledge of using Scratch and there are a lot of resources both in school and online that I can refer to. I think that I can confidently create this program in 3 hours.

I haven’t used GameMaker for a few years so I will need to spend some time working through the resources the school has to familiarise myself with the development environment. As we use the Lite version in school there aren’t a huge amount of resources out there so I will need to use a bit of trial and error to fix any snags or bugs I come across. I think I can complete this project reasonably in around 15 hours.

Having never used Python before I will have a lot of work to do to get myself comfortable with using the software development language. There are a number of resources both in and outside of school which I can use to help build up my knowledge. I predict that this challenge will take a significantly longer time to complete as I will need to learn the language as I go. I predict it will take me around 40 hours to complete the program and fix any bugs or errors.

Picking software for development means thinking about your own experience with it.

Create a project plan for a game such as Pacman and include a list of assets required for a game like this.

You may pick your own game, but do not pick a game that is overly complicated.