We made it to the finals week. I think the main takeaways are this:

I think we handled these areas well:

• Pivoting

  • We managed to move quickly between ideas. Pivoting is not always the best thing in such a short project, but is a valuable skill. When we ran into problems with the game and got feedback we responded quickly. Sometimes this made us lose focus, but all in all we were a very adaptable team.

• Meetings

  • We were productive when working together to plan in the meetings. I always left them very hopeful for the week. Our organization dipped a bit in the final week, but for the beginning and middle of the project it was really top notch.

• The Idea

  • It changed a lot but we generally tried to do something creative and I’m super proud we did. It may not have worked out the way we hoped, but in the end the idea we had is a unique creation of ours. It’s not something you can find perfectly duplicate on steam, and I would struggle to even categorize it well.

Cons

• Communication outside of meetings

  • Outside of the meeting we were all kind of off on our own. I hold the online term responsible for a lot of that. I really really hate the fact that we couldn’t be in a room together or in the lab. On the few occasions that we were able to get in a call and work in tandem we got so much done. It’s really unfortunate that didn't happen more often.

• Lack of pre production

  • I think this idea was most hurt by a lack of planning. I think the downside of coming at this from a very new perspective is that we didn’t really know where to take it sometimes. Had we spent an extra two weeks in pre production writing the script and demoing in twine instead of spending time in unity I think we would have had an entirely different project. This genre of game lends to a lot more planning and less building than a traditional game.

• Work balance

  • Practically every week was a lopsided work effort. We just dropped the ball on spreading out tasks effectively. In hindsight I think we shouldn't have assigned the formal roles we did. Every role should have had one main person and then everyone should have been in a flex position to move around and help weekly. I think restructuring like this would have fixed the too many cooks in the kitchen problem of writing, and gotten us farther in the places we came up short, i.e unity and a few assets.