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Ending the final semester with some finishing touches. The team made an excellent effort to get all the work done, this could not have been done without the team's collaboration altogether. It was an interesting experience, one in which I would have never imagined myself being apart at the start of last year. The project has truly come a long way from the first build and it's far from what we first envisioned, however, we are happy with how it turned out, even if it's not perfect. It was a great experience working with everyone on my team, and I want to thank them for a great couple of months. 

My work this past week was character dialogue for the last level on two characters, the hippo's wife and the bird's mom. I had to make sure the dialogue connected to the products we have and that it was just interesting enough to be engaging. Coming up with the products was the most interesting part. Now I'm not sure If ill ever decide to take on a narrative role again.... probably not as much as I appreciate a good story in shows and games.  However, I did not mind the experience as it was quite an insightful journey overall. I think my main takeaway is that it is easier to put yourself in the mindset of the character you are dialoguing with but tougher to create multiple different personalities for other characters. It is crucial to differentiate between different characters and their personalities, otherwise, each of your characters' personalities will mesh together.  Different characters with unique personalities is ultimately what will make a more interesting narrative. This is what I have learned from reading stories. The characters are what captivate the reader the most, if the characters fail to do so, the reader will not be as hooked or interested in the narrative.

Welcome to my third and not-so-final dev log. This past week was an interesting one as the main programmer was not present and so I had to step up and put together the project and its build for the week. Thanks to my member providing instructions on the code and commenting on their code, I was able to grasp the code of the engine quite quickly making it easier for me to complete what was needed for this week. As we are already a small group enough, I feel to add more to the project. As much as I would have loved to research more to add to the build, such as products and characters, with the limited time we had, we decided to address this later with the group the following week. I kind of enjoyed Learning Godot, it is by far the easiest to work in an engine when compared to Unity and Unreal Engine. In the Tier scale, you get Godot, Unity and then Unreal. My main job this week was duplicating level 1 to level 2, swapping out the character images, and adding new dialogue into the posts. I also spent time with my team members brainstorming product ideas and new characters. For dialogue this week, I was tasked with the Flamingo and learned a lot about their interests.

As for the playtest, it was quite insightful and helped brainstorm ways to improve the build and mitigate our current problems. Some issues that were brought up were ones I am already aware of, creating that challenge aspect. They also suggested perhaps a fake option that looks like the correct option… stay tuned. 

Production on Algos Marketing Company is moving along pretty smoothly with team Brain Soup, everyone has their own set of tasks cut out for them and we have been managing with the small group we are. I have been mainly focused on the game/level design role. These past couple of weeks, we have decided on the direction we want to take with our design and this included a Twitter-like form of three different characters. Each character is ultimately someone you want to sell a product to and try to convince them to purchase the product. I was tasked with designing the Walrus's dialogue. This ultimately forced me to learn more about walruses and find out about their habitat and their day-to-day activities. With this, I tried replicating a Walrus's behaviour as if they were human in the narrative dialogue texts. Narrative as a topic is not exactly my strong suit, however, I do enjoy a good story with engaging characters so I hope through playtesting I will find out if the character is somewhat interesting or not. Next stop, is editing the dialogue to be more engaging, enhancing the current level design and adding more levels and finally adding a little introduction/tutorial sequence.

As a team, we have decided to meet at least once a week apart from our usual class meeting dates. Wednesday mornings seem to be the most preferred date amongst the group and work the most with everyone’s schedule. Our biggest challenge so far is trying to schedule a meeting with everyone being available to show up to the meeting as we think it's crucial for all members of the group to be present. Although we’ve had occasions of split group meetings, we would fill each other in later in the chat on what we talked about and if everyone agrees or disagrees.  We are going to attempt to make Wednesday meetings weekly at 12 noon, for at least an hour, going for as long as needed. We will make sure all are notified during the Tuesday class.

So far, we have spent our time as a group working on puzzle concept ideas and documents for class. We still want to work on our guidelines such as the Work Breakdown Schedule and develop our game mechanics to fully commit to designs and prototypes, hence we haven’t started that aspect just yet. Once we get that document complete, we will begin prototyping.

I like to write my current tasks down on a list and order them in importance from what should be done first to last. That helps me stay productive and get my work done. I prefer to complete tasks one at a time as I find doing multiple isn’t as effective for impending deadlines that are fast approaching. 

Heyo, Im very interested to see how this goes. A narrative aspect would be a really good way to depict social issues such as bullying and gossip. A game like this can be very entertaining and dramatic, which is even more fun to see, excited to see how yall make the gameplay

Hello, a robot-oriented game sounds interesting. I'm wondering what the gameplay is going to be like, considering doing the maintenance aspects and how that ties into the overall theme/message your team is trying to perceive. I think workers' rights are really intriguing and crucial to emphasize as well, as it rarely is talked about compared to AI. 

Helloo, I find your ideating process quite fun to read and interesting. I think gene splicing is a unique topic and not one a lot of people know about... like me. (Apart from people studying sciences). Im curious to see how you're gonna incorporate gameplay and aliens.

For this week, I pitched my climate change game idea to my team as a concept overall, I wasn’t sure how further I would go with it if we were to continue it and develop it. As I spent many hours thinking about how I could develop climate change in a good scope and yet unique gameplay …. many papers were scrunched up and tossed into the trash.  My process began with many ideas jotted down, real-world environmental issues listed as well as games researched that tie in both animals and climate change to a gameplay sequence. This was the hardest challenge for me as I'm very thorough with my research.

Anyway, going forward my team decided to make our game about misinformation passed on through social media and false advertisement. I do find this quite an interesting topic and I’m excited to work on it. As a team, we decided to take time individually to come up with a new method of gameplay for this specific topic. In my concept of this iteration, I want players to ultimately play in a world of lies and they must decipher who is telling the truth. Ultimately this would be a puzzle/adventure game. The gameplay will be through a series of prompts, you must piece together a narrative that is true and not derived from false information. We decided that our game would revolve around UI designs and puzzles which works well for our team of one artist and this project isn’t programming heavy. 

Hey Sarah, VR is a growing topic in the modern day and its value is only growing with the whole "metaverse". I find it interesting you were able to find positives and negatives on the topic. I did research once in a philosophy class on the experience machine if you want to learn about that. It's quite similar in the sense that people want to immerse themselves in a virtual world. It is expressed from a philosophical and psychological stand point. It was also talked about in the "Matrix"

Hey Amy, I find cybersecurity quite an intriguing topic and I'm always curious about how exactly programmers are able to hack through these systems to begin with.  When I read about remote hacking into cars, the first thing that came to mind was spy movies where they used cars to escape by hacking them. I think this idea has a lot of potential as a game solution and excited to see where you go with this. 

The following week I was assigned to write a research report for a design challenge. The topic I chose to research was Climate change as it is an issue that impacts everyone globally and has been increasing exponentially over the last couple of months. Hence, I found it a great topic to learn more about for this design challenge. However, the topic is quite a broad one and so I had to narrow down which parts of climate change I wanted to go over. There are a few main ones such as effects on effects on the globe, effects on the vegetation and effects on animals. Each of these categories fills a wide spectrum of issues happening worldwide. I decided to focus more on Biodiversity how that is being affected and why it is crucial to learn more about it.  

                The main topics I decided to write about were how global warming causes animals to relocate and how it sped up their growth phases. I also dove into how carbon dioxide emissions not only affect the climate through the excess amount of it in the atmosphere but lead to sinking into the ocean, leading to ocean acidification. Which, harms marine life due to the high pH levels in the water that are not healthy for aquatic animals. I always knew the common terms like, “habitat loss” and “ocean acidification” were commonly used but never quite understood what that meant and how it is being caused. Thanks to the research I conducted I was able to learn that carbon dioxide does indeed harm marine life with excess amount of it in the ocean. Also, warmer temperatures cause animals to locate on higher altitudes plains.

                Ultimately, this research helped me find concrete evidence and information regarding climate change on Biodiversity. With this data I have collected I can use it to create a design challenge where my initial thought was to create a post-dystopian world, you play to help restore the world from the damages it caused. My idea was to design a narrative-driven story in a third-person setting, with the endangered animals that are at risk. As the player, you would be fighting off invasive species or finding new homes for these animals. I feel like there are a lot of ways I can go about this topic; hence I will continue to research more on how I can define a playable space based on climate change. 

Hey Grace, I wanted to express how I thought this was a very interesting topic that you chose to write about and really sounds like something you don't quite see as often. Often,  people will write about social media as a negative and not one that is beneficial to people. Im quite interested in seeing how you proved your points and what you said to further affirm social media as a positive