Weapon of Choice Approved on CG Beta

The game was submitted to the Community Games Beta a few days ago and cleared the Peer Review. Shew! The Peer Review involved other CG developers downloading the game to their PC and launching it on their retail Xbox 360. The idea is they play the game and test to ensure it doesn't crash, doesn't have prohibited content (such as porn or copyrighted material), and that it matches the descriptors I set when I submitted the game for review. The descriptors are things like blood and sexual content. The process gets more difficult when it asks how much cruelty is in the game. Its easy to say there's blood in the game but am I being cruel to the aliens when I blow them apart? I gave it a 1 out of 3. If other peer reviewers had disagreed with this or my other descriptors the game would have gotten rejected. From there I would have to readjust the self-rating based on others feedback and resubmit it.

Fortunately no one turned it downed based on the descriptors and even better--it didn't crash for anyone! I had tested it thoroughly and didn't find any crashes myself, but there's nothing like having someone that's never played it try it out. While the game is 'out there', it's not currently publicly available. Other Community Games developers can play a limited version of Weapon of Choice, but the full game won't go on sale until later this Holiday season.
While not technically necessary I was interested in putting the game through the complete Community Games process in order to see how it worked, how long the process took, and to force myself to work on the 'boring' things that needed to get done and were starting to accumulate. The big one of those was addressing the television 'title safe' region issues for text and menus. Developing on a new computer monitor, I had pretty much (foolishly) expanded everything to fill the entire screen. On a TV this doesn't work very well as lot of the edges of text and images are lost. This work took entirely too long, but at least it's finished and I won't have to deal with it too much in the future.