Hey Amy!
I totally agree with the playtests being a bit too early into the semester, it might not be an issue with our teams as we started development earlier than intended, but for teams that stuck to a schedule that aligns with this class it could be cutting it close. I've heard this advice from a professor, but sometimes it's not great to spend all the time in pre-production just focusing on the design documents and is actually better to kick off a prototype once you have a decent idea of what your game is. This way you can see early on if the game is fun and make changes to the design when it's still cheap and quick to do so. If you just focus on design first and spend a whole year in this phase, once you begin to develop the game you may find out that the base of what the game is just isn't engaging and might have to redo a lot of progress which will set back the team. Coming back to the main point, it's great that our teams began development on the game earlier since we could get ahead and can test to see if the core gameplay loop is interesting!
It was awesome to see your dialogue system implemented in the game too, super cool to hear it's working well with the NPCs : )