Kyle writes: "The proposal should have focused on making a game engine rather than have the pretense that a story driven game is made.". This is my bad. Apparently, the proposal did not give the impression that the point was on making an involving story. The point really is to make a story-driven game, but I suppose I must have focused too heavily on implementation details. This will be revised in the next version.
Kyle's opinion is that the project is "impossible to implement in a twelve-week period". To this allegation, here is a screenshot from a one-day "spike" demonstrating the feasibility of the project. Start to finish, the spike took 22 hours:
Notice the crude shadows. The airplane is also shooting, and flying over a terrain loaded from a file. The code for this is horrendously messy, but it demonstrates that the technical challenge of making a basic game framework to add content to is NOT impossible. I also found the assertion surprising given our mutual experience in CS 413, which required a demanding project as well.
It should be noted that in-class, Kyle said that making a renderer might not be such a difficult task for someone like him or me, but that as a group project proposal, it might be unfeasible--although I do say in my proposal that "A graphics library will likely be used to help set up the basics.", and I would hope that people would know their capabilities before signing up for any project.
Follows, a breakdown of Kyle's quantitative assessments and my responses to his rationale.
Format: 2/5
Kyle says that the format is hard to follow and disorganized, as well as missing sections. This is somewhat true. I feel like the proposal is well-organized, but some sections are indeed missing. This is because I was unaware of Ackley's recommendations for the proposal here. In any case, this is an excellent (implicit) suggestion; this shall be corrected in the next revision.
Writing: 3/5
Kyle writes that the grammar and spelling are "fine save for a few errors". I'll look for these while revising. Kyle points out that each section is a rehash of the last. This is somewhat true; I tried to look at the project from different perspectives in each section. However, it is correct that that could be improved.
Goals and Tasks: 1/5
In contrast to Kyle's assertion that there is no description whatsoever of how the project should be accomplished, the proposal does give more than two pages of step-by-step discussion about what each phase of the project entails in section V. I agree that the "proposal gives a vague idea of what the author wants"; my idea is never really concretely hammered down. This will be revised.
Scope: 1/5
I agree that I can be more clear about what is and what is not a part of the project. I feel like there is at least some consideration (for example, networking is optional if there's enough time).
Plausibility: 1/5
Kyle's opinion is that "there is a lack of direction" and that "the project has too many ideas crammed into one to be plausible". I definitely agree that there is at least some lack of direction, though I note that I deliberately left the storyline open-ended, because I think that's the fun part of the project, and I didn't want to tie us down. To the second, I don't think there are too many ideas--the project is, in essence just a WWI flight simulator with a story that doesn't suck. The only extra idea--to make it multiplayer--was deliberately made optional in case it would make the project too hard. And, with regards to plausibility, please see the screenshot above.
Novelty: 1/5
Kyle writes that the idea is too unclear to be compared, and that there are no competitors listed. I think that this is true. In the next revision, competitors and inspirations will be listed. I would argue that my project has at least some novelty, in that it goes in a direction that modern games never go, but I think perhaps this was impeded by a lack of clarity.
Stakeholders Identification: 1/5
I did not list stakeholders in my proposal. This will be corrected in the next revision.
Support and Impact: 2/5
Kyle writes: "The author throws out a couple of ideas[,] but never flushes them out to be a business model." I completely agree with this. It shall be corrected.
Evidence: 1/5
I also agree that there is a lack of evidence in the arguments for need and impact.
Challenges and Risks: [No score given?]
Kyle writes "The proposal doesn't take a look at what might be difficult or why it is." I would like to direct Kyle's attention to section IV, "Requirement Challenges". This section describes the major issues and potential resolutions of each of the six major portions of the project, over the course of a solid two pages. I actually think this is one of the areas the proposal is best on.
So: thanks, Kyle, for reviewing my proposal! I appreciate that you expounded the faults of the project proposal as you saw them rather than trying to sugarcoat or ignore them. And, despite the fact that your review was harsh (even you said as much), I think that it's all for the best. I feel like a lot of your criticism is justified and useful, although I think that you missed some key points when reading. I will take your recommendations into consideration when revising this proposal.
As for me, I realized some other faults in my proposal as I reread it with Kyle's critique. These issues will be fixed as well. A selection is below:
-As opposed to listing what is included in the project and then letting the reader infer from there, I think a good idea would be to define some negative boundaries of what will NOT be in the project.
-Adding explicit risks would be beneficial in section IV.
-Kyle mentioned this in passing: there is no budget analysis.
Ian
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