By far the shortest of the three periods of production, Gold Standard was fairly straightforward for me. With all mechanics and systems completed by beta, my job turned entirely to asset implementation, with minor bug-fixing and QA throughout whenever I found issues. Asset implementation is an easy but monotonous and boring job - mostly limited to swapping out placeholders and doing minor edits to blueprints to accommodate for new SFX or sprites. As a whole, my workload was fairly light and uneventful, but because of how short gold standard was, a handful of weeks, I didn't feel any less busy than in beta or alpha.
Team cohesion felt much more comprehensive throughout gold standard. Taking on the lessons imparted by our experiences in alpha and beta along with feedback from industry, we finally nailed down a format for our meetings and discussions that helped to ensure everyone was up to speed and that conflicts were quickly resolved without much dispute. This could've been down to the fact that we knew there wasn't much time and so were in more of an agreeable mood than before, but I choose to believe it's more down to improved meetings and our MoSCoW meeting we held at the start of gold standard. Our MoSCoW meeting let us decide what to keep and what to toss, making sure that nobody was working towards dead-ends or assets/features that were likely never going to see the light of day anyway.
The biggest threat to gold standard was time. Term dates meant that we had weeks rather than months to complete work. As such, our expectations had to be reduced and scope had to be readjusted. Many features we had yet to work on were quietly cut from the game, such as cutscenes and collectables. Our game's plot / story took the hardest hit out of everything - both of the cut features were specifically plot related and would've helped to communicate the main character's justification behind attacking the conductor, along with the backstory surrounding both of them. While it's a shame to see story thrown to the wind, it's understandable given that this is only a vertical slice of a game and is mainly supposed to showcase the flow of gameplay rather than plot and story. If our game were closer to some of the other team's projects (e.g. Cayla and Henry's teams, both much more dependent on story and dialogue than our game) then plot might have been a more important consideration.
Our vertical slice showcases the culmination of our efforts after so much toiling, correcting, fixing, and changing to adapt to the circumstances that we found ourselves in each stage of development. It is the product of 5 incredibly dedicated developers and shines as an example of all we have learned over the two years of our course, along with what we've picked up in our own time as individual professionals. The editing, the gameplay, the story are all individually of incredible quality, and blend together to create something that I'm proud to say I contributed towards. If I had to nitpick an issue to discuss, it would have to be the pacing of the trailer. It takes a fairly long time to get from the story animatic to the actual gameplay, and at times the gameplay segment feels rushed and slightly tacked onto the trailer. Besides this, it still contributes in its own way to make an incredible trailer.
Overall, I am happy with the (near) finished product we have at the end of gold standard, given that by the end of beta we had concerns over whether our game would even end up looking close to what we had envisioned all the way back in pre-production. Both our preview video and our trailer are brilliant representations of what we have accomplished, and I'm more than proud and ready to present this work to industry come the conference in London.