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I find your insight into writing character dialogue really interesting. When writing character dialogue, it's kind of like acting, in a way; you have to really put yourself in the shoes of that character. Only once you consider their personality, their current situation, and their relationships, can you really know the best thing for them to say. Having to switch between all those different characters constantly while writing, especially when they're talking to each other, can be really tough; imagine voice acting a game all by yourself.

I applaud you taking on a role you weren't sure you could do great in though. Even if you don't pursue narrative writing in the future, this experience should be a great help in understanding how to help your narrative teammates in the future.

It's great to see your game starting to really come together.

The miro diagrams especially are a great way of communicating what the game should look and play like to everyone on your team!

However, this is a bit of a nitpick, but I would advise against using the word "Week" (Week 1, Week 2) when talking about individual levels in your game. I understand that it fits the story/aesthetic, but for planning documents, weeks are usually reserved to sprints (like you have on your Jira) and I was a bit confused when I first saw the diagrams referred to as "weeks."

Aside from that, I'm glad you're happy with your team's progress, and wish you luck in the coming weeks to get this ready for the first playtest!

It's exciting to see some technical design work in this kind of small scale project. Programmers being able to translate code into understandable, easy to digest explanations for those who don't really need to know how to code is extremely useful. 

I suggest you keep up this process if you have time for it as the project continues because, even though it's not as directly important, it'll make the life of everyone on your team easier.

I wish you good luck, and hope for the success of the strategies you've outlined!

It's good to see a lot of work being poured into the pre production of  your project!

I would advise your team to start pressing on into working your prototype/proof of concept into a playable build, or at least a vertical slice, for the upcoming playtest.

I wish we had a little bit more time for pre production, but it seems we're being thrust right into the playtesting aspect of this project, meaning we need concrete builds of some kind. 

I wish you and your team luck on your project, and I believe your work on setting up future plans will pay off for you.

Making an animated presentation to show off the concept you have for the gameplay of your first day is an interesting idea, although I'd be careful, since the point is to be able to show off what the game is like to play, and not what it's like to look at. Good luck going into the next semester!

Using the time we have over the break to familiarize yourself with the engine you'll be plunging into is a great idea! I hope you have enough time to do that among actually getting to take a break from this busy semester, and working on whatever else you want to do. Good luck!

Starting off with aspects of the game that will rally the team together, like designing a great main character, is a great way to start a project and get everyone on the same page! I'm excited to see your demo in action, and hope you also have a great break, Hejie. Good luck!

Hi Yanfei!

It's good that you're already on top of starting up your Jira for your first few weeks leading up to the prototype build.

If you can, I recommend looking into a rough overview of what your team's schedule for the next semester could be. Having a basic outline for what needs to be done each week when starting this project for real will give your team a much easier time overall, in my experience.

I wish you luck, and hope your schedule works out for you and your team!

Hi Ethan!

I commend you on getting a schedule for the next semester started. Knowing your team's focus for the whole project before even starting is a great way to keep yourselves in check, and make sure everything gets done.

I hope you also have a schedule ready for the prototype for this semester, since we do need a greenlight build, I believe.

Either way, good luck!

Hi Todd! I was a bit confused by this explanation. If each week is a sprint of work you're doing as the programmer, this seems like it might be a lot of work to get all these features implemented in one week each. However, if those "weeks" are each of the different levels in your game, then it makes a lot more sense to me, although I'm still confused since I'm pretty sure this devlog should be about our schedule for working on the game, and not necessarily the structure of the game. Good luck on your work, though!

This dice mechanic, and choosing where to allocate your rolls, reminds me a lot of Dicey Dungeons. I think it's a pretty interesting idea, because it makes a great basis for a strategy game. It might be good to add a bit more to the idea in terms of supplemental mechanics, like random events that can happen to your fish, for instance. I wish you luck in moving forward with the project your team decided on, however.

It seems that a lot of people went with a visual novel-style idea this year. I think that's probably because coming up with a very involved idea, in terms of mechanics, for a specific topic on a "serious game" was quite a challenge. I think making sure your game as enough interesting player interaction is important, especially because we are in a Game Design course after all. Good luck moving forward!

I think the way in which you and your team decided to split off and come up with unique individual ideas for the overall pitch you went with is really interesting. 

It's tempting to just go with the idea of the pitch someone suggested, without considering what others would add, but this solution is a pretty good fix for that problem. Having everyone pitch smaller ideas related to the big pitch idea you went with is a great way to expand on it. I wish you and your team luck.

Hi Shane!

Translating a topic as broad and observation based as wealth inequality may be a difficult task, because you'll need to narrow down what you want to do for the gameplay without too much to base it on. In my opinion, I believe it would be a good idea to find smaller examples of wealth inequality in the way you want to portray the subject, and make a game around that example. This might be a stronger approach because it would be difficult to cover the entire topic well in a small game, I believe. 

Regardless, I'm interested to see which direction you'll choose to take, and wish you luck.

Hi Kean!

I think the ways in which online advertisers are taking advantage of things like social media to ruthlessly advertise to their users is getting increasingly disturbing. The more developed these algorithms get, the more they can start to carve out each individual user's identity and interests, which leads to even more specific adverts. I once saw a Custom T-Shirt site advertising crazy specific T-Shirt designs to specific users because it found that user to have certain qualities, like a shirt that says "I'm a single mom with 2 adorable pugs, don't mess with me!"

Good luck on adapting your social media research to a game design, I'm excited to see what you come up with.