itch.io

Hey Zimu! I definitely get what you mean about having to rush production towards the end as everyone gets busy with internship hunting and things like that, it also affected my team as well so I can relate. Hopefully you're successful in finding an internship!

I'm glad to hear that you were able to come out of the project with new skills and a shift in your focus, I'm sure that'll be useful moving forward into capstone! It's important to personally reflect on your own contributions in a larger group project like this one to really see what you were able to contribute and how you've changed from the start of the project to now and it seems like you've done that!

It's good that you guys are aware of faults in your team composition and workflow, sometimes things like that are just unavoidable or too late into development to change which is unfortunate but I think there's a lot to learn from that if you're aware of it during production. Hopefully the stuff you guys experienced will help in capstone!

Hey! I'm glad to hear that your full team is in production now; that's definitely something we're still striving for with our team; it sucks being stuck in the limbo of some things being in production with some documentation/pre-production being done, but I can't really do anything about it. Playtesting also took quite a lot out of our team, with our initial tests going way differently than we had hoped or expected, but it's all about how you can pivot and move forward based on the feedback you got and how quickly you can adapt to the project's new needs.

Hey Ben, it's interesting to see the contrast in our approaches to level design for the same project, I definitely agree that things have been off to a slower start than I expected, with personal life problems keeping some of us busy and some of us getting sick, but slow is steady and that's not a bad thing right? Hopefully the pace will pick up towards the latter half of the project

Hey Ty, sucks to hear that you've got a lot going on outside of the project, I've been there and it's hard to stay on track when things are hectic in your personal life, good luck with that. It's interesting to see how production is being modified to adapt to a shortened project timeline, we've got a similar situation and it's making me a bit anxious but I know it's for the good of the team.

It definitely sounds like you and your team are super prepared, that extra pass over the team's GDD at this stage of the project is something that I don't think most teams are doing but going that extra mile will help boost productivity and make the end goal a bit clearer.

Sometimes, we may not have that "one more day" and passion and care for a project while I agree that it is absolutely necessary to make something great, it is not enough to carry a project to complete. But the research you've done so far seems really good and I think it will definitely come in useful for the next semester.

I think the use of a team kanban board is a great idea (maybe we'll use it for this project) but one thing I've noticed in your post is that even though you found it to be useful if the whole team isn't participating in using it, then the momentum of the project could fall apart (at least temporarily) as a group scheduling tool like that seems heavily reliant on everyone using it. I do worry about things like that happening in future projects because no matter what you do if your whole team isn't contributing to it, it doesn't feel as effective. I guess it is good for finding out who is having trouble with keeping track of things and that in itself is a useful thing to know. 

I've tried using checklist sort of apps for managing my work schedule but often I find it still hard to use unless you have a list for each specific thing, like I can't mix personal project deadlines/tasks on the same list with schoolwork or my brain gets scrambled. It seems like it works for you so let me know if you use anything else to help with task tracking outside of school!

hey berg,

You had a great pitch despite the reduced time you had to work on it, I can definitely tell that this idea was pieced together ahead of time, as a lot of the concepts are really well thought out and the the entire thing really fits the setting you chose. I think the setting of it all has to be my favourite part as it's not only a really interesting setting for a game but it's so important to the themes of the game and the serious topic you chose to focus on. You did a great job in reducing the pitch from 10 minutes to 3 at such short notice, especially with the amount of content you had prepared it must've been difficult to decide what makes it in and what's not as important but even outside of pitches that's a skill that will definitely come in handy throughout development as we encounter potential scope issues and having to cut out things. Looking forward to working on the game and I'm glad your pitch was chosen!

ayo,

I didn't think about it before reading your devlog but the unexpected time reduction we got was tricky to work around but I feel like it definitely forced us to reduce our pitches to their core components. While unexpected I do agree that it's something that can happen in a real pitch so I'm kind of glad we got to experience that firsthand. I really liked your pitch and how well it incorporated the serious topic you chose into the entire game itself, although your pitch wasn't chosen, I'm glad we get to work together on Josh's idea, I think it'll be really interesting working together throughout the year, looking forward to it!

Hey Ethan, 

I really loved your pitch and I can tell the idea had a lot of room for expansion. Other than the potential issues with scope it really was a sound idea and I hope you get to pursue it in the future but for this class and project timeline I can definitely see how it'd probably be a huge undertaking to get all of it done and polished by april. I can definitely tell this was an idea you've been sitting on for a while, it seems very well thought out and put together. I hope you get to flesh out the idea more!

Ayo, I think both your game ideas are pretty solid for a topic like this, I think there's definitely a lot of room for a game that's both compelling & heavily connected to the importance of such a topic. I personally think the management sim game idea is both a compelling game idea and one that can really get the message of the topic across to players. But at the same time, the shark game sounds like a more fun game that more players can probably engage with so I'm curious to see how your ideas change and which one you focus on for the game pitch!

yo! Comparison in relation to social media and the effect it has on people is such a prominent topic but such a difficult one to report on formally, I think using games as a medium of exploring this topic is a really good idea as it takes a non-conventional approach to showing the effects of such a dangerous but difficult to talk about subject. People nowadays are sometimes reduced to the sum of their social media status (just look at LinkedIn) and it's crazy that so few people are aware of this so I think this is a good direction to be going in with your research!

Hey Berg! This was a super interesting devlog! I've always been fascinated by communities like this one and the history behind their formation, I think it's a real smart move to utilize your background as a motivating factor in your research topic by focusing on favelas and Brazil's troubles with wealth inequality, I think it'll allow you to create a game pitch that connects more to the heart of the issue since it almost can feel like a problem you can directly connect with I'd imagine. Can't wait to see how your research translates to the game pitch!