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Hey Brady,

I see you were brave enough to be able to make new number changes during the last final days before the due date. When I do things like these, they tend to go wrong sometimes but I'm surprised it went well for you, especially since this was a big project.

Sometimes it's a big risk to readjust somethings last minute. I've had some things not work out well in the end, like for example, for my Auto-Shipping Solutions game, when the player would finish the level, if they desire to play again, they would still keep their score from the last time they played the level.

That's just something to keep in mind when working on future projects, we don't want to run into any issues last minute and be up until 4am still working on it or not sleeping at all as it can really affect our sleep schedules.

But other than that, you and your team did a great job at completing this big project.

Hello Todd,

I have to say you did a great job at programming and implementing assets that were finished many sprints ago to make sure everything moves and works out properly as planned out. I know there were times that you would stay up until 4am or even not sleep at all since our team fell behind on tasks numerous times, and I thank you for that because I personally wouldn't be able to stay up that long. The game went from looking a bit dull and boring to exciting and fun within a week, and I've never seen something get done so fast within 5 days. Good thing we kept a medium difficulty project that we could finish it with few problems.

And I agree, if the team decides to keep working on this in the future we can implement different days with new mechanics into the game to make a better piece for our portfolios.

Hey Ethan,

From what I've read, you've done a great job at taking ownership of programming after your main programmer left the team. I could not have done anything better than what you did to contribute to the team. Despite not getting the project properly finished, you can still work on it with your team after the semester's over, if you feel that the project feels too simple. You may not have felt very proud of your finalized product but I'm confident you can use what you've learned this year in future projects

Hello Sebastian,

Looks like this feedback you received may take some time to finish achieving. Respect. (as you normally say to others XD) . But honestly, I wish you and your team the best of luck in getting these bugs fixed. Given how large your project looked from halfway through the first semester, I imagine there will be many mechanics to learn and get the hang of. 

Overall, I think many people will love what the final product will be in the end as I've heard a lot of how much time and effort your team has been putting over the weeks.

Good luck to you and the rest of your team in getting the final product done!

I'm really impressed by the assets and animations you have come up with. They're definitely better than what our team has come up with. Our assets are a bit basic. But Aseprite has definitely helped us in making our own assets. If you could tell me what software you used to create these, I would more than gladly learn how to use them myself for future projects. 

I agree with you that it is stressing and exciting to think that everything has to be done within two weeks left to g.

Good luck in making the final product!

Hello Jamie,

I appreciate how you're putting in different animations for the robot. From what I'm seeing, this will be a great addition to the final product since we do want to see different states of the robot indicating in what position it is at. The mechanics and layouts of the art assets are done which means they just need to be put inside of the Unity engine itself.

The narrative content may look like another thing that's missing but that will surely be figured out once the game is fully working in the game engine.

I can't wait to see what the final product will be like!

It sucks to lose somebody from your team. Especially, if it's someone that is really experienced on a certain level of skill and the rest of you are not. If any of you on the team is inexperienced with programming, what I did to improve was take some online courses and watched many youtube tutorials. This is something is strongly recommend. But aside from that, the work you are doing looks great so far, with great use of objects and written text. Hope everything goes great with the team for the rest of the semester.

Hi Shane,

Great to hear how you are improving different skills in the area of skills. Coming into this program I didn't have much experience with coding and using Maya either. I only started using both of those software when I first entered the program. It's always good to take responsibility of doing other things outside your comfort zone because in the future who knows that those new skills might come in handy. The skills you are learning just now are the ones that I'm trying to improve as well since I want to become better at using those skills in future projects as well.

Hello Todd,

I would like to say that you so far are doing a great job at making a basic UI for our game as our programmer. This will definitely help us make great transitions from a menu into the gameplay scene of the game. The schedule has also been well adjusted to meet the new deadlines we have set up for ourselves. It will greatly benefit us in the weeks to come and make sure the requirements get done on time. I can't wait to see how we can get a prototype ready for people to start playtesting! 

It sounds great how you plan on creating gaming visuals. By having a main character, you get a great start on working on the project.  Now that that has been done, having the mechanics which I think we already have done by this point can get the character moving so the player can control it to have a prototype ready sometime next semester. The layouts/levels that have been designed gave us a major boost towards finishing pre-production. Hope you have a great time during your break to take a rest from doing assignments.

Hello Amy!

Sounds like you and your teammates are on the right track and are ready for the production phase next semester.  I greatly agree with how you guys are doing team meetings. It helps a lot to make your tasks get done as quickly as possible either based on what their currently working on or if new tasks need to be assigned to each other. I'm eager to see how all of this will play out in the next semester.

Great to hear how your project is coming along. Organizing things through in-person team meetings speeds up the process nicely. Me and my team have not been doing that since not all of us show up on Fridays (our only day on campus), we've mostly just been doing remote stuff through Discord. Regardless, we are still making great progress. Having a shared drive and spreadsheet also helps keep everything neat and everyone on your team gets easy access. Looking forward to see how all of this will play out in the next semester.

Hey there Janna. I think you are off to a great start with these team meetings. Having meetings like this gets the working process done faster than one normally would during class. At least this is how I get them done out of all the assignments I've been working on during the entire program.  Working in person, not only helps with getting this project done, but It also gives you a great chance to discuss other game design-related topics as well and get stuff done from those topics as well. I know it can be hard to have an in-person meeting since people are busy working on other tasks left and right. Usually, when it comes to this it's best to let everyone know about it ahead of time (usually 2-3 days in advance) to see if everyone is on the same page or not. This proves to be useful for not only absent team members but also gives you something to use every now and then.

Hello there Tian.  I like hearing your thoughts about how you want to move forward with this project with more gameplay elements. When it comes to this, however, I think in terms of getting stuff organized it can be hard since we all have so many things going on at once. that it can be hard to get things done properly. I understand why you would use those sticky notes for this reason lol. The work is going smoothly so far so I would not worry about it but it's nice to see that you want to do new things as well. I want to make myself a more useful team member in the days that are to come so I'm always down to learn new things as well just in case we run out of level design and narrative design stuff to do, which are my main strengths.  Wish you luck!

Hello Ashton,

I understand how you feel. Time management/scheduling has always been a nightmare for me and it still is.  I fall behind on numerous tasks and I barely leave myself any time to finish them. But aside from that, it's great to hear that you have in-person meetings every now and then. This always helps in getting tasks done quicker and provides better communication with your teammates, than you would when working remotely. I agree that sometimes tasks can get out of hand with people falling behind on other things. My team isn't always on campus so 90% of the time we don't do in-person meetings, we mostly spend doing everything in a discord call, which really doesn't help since making progress this way feels a bit slow and we're not communicating a lot.

I'm glad to hear that your idea worked out in the end. Your idea sounds great. I agree that addressing real issues is a great way to approach a creative scenario. Using UI elements is interesting for your game to address these situations. You describe what this game is going to be based off of and I am more curious to know about how the gameplay will look like. What problems will the player solve by using these UI elements?

Hello Keanichii. I like how you shared this with us because I have similar experiences about making presentations. One, I am bad at time management so I end up running low on time and have to rush through the projects I have to finish so I don't hand it in late. Two, when I do leave things till the last minute, sometimes I miss out on writing down important information. That, or I don't go into too much detail. During my pitch presentation, I made a mistake in which I left out the player experience and left the professor confused about how the player will interact with things inside of the game. It's frustrating but we all make mistakes.

When it comes to teamwork, it can take a lot of time to combine everyone's idea all into one. Sometimes, one person's ideas will be left out in the end, and that person will feel upset, but they also have to understand that everyone else's ideas might make more sense for the final game/product. I felt like this sometimes during previous Design Weeks where I came up with my own ideas and I had to readjust them because we would come up with completely new ideas and it wouldn't make any sense to use them in our final game.  Don't feel like you are making yourself useless. You can always take away the ideas you have made in your own project, and change those up so they can somehow be used into the game your team has decided on.

Hello Amy. I totally agree with you. I am also a person that gets anxiety when presenting in front of a live audience in person and prefers to do online presentations to avoid freezing up and stuttering. I read my presentation scripts in online presentations during Year 1 since everything was online due to Covid reasons lol.  When it comes to sharing stuff through Discord, however, it does not give me too much anxiety since I am already familiarized with the people I am working with. Although yes if you have to speak with people you don't know whatsoever, it can be a bit weird at the beginning given you don't exactly know how  the conversation will start and go. I experienced all of this in both design weeks of Year 1, when we all spoke through Discord without knowing each other. And finally, I agree that it is fair to give everyone a chance to share their ideas because from there you can find out about everyone's skills and how everyone can help each other out to make the final product.

You covered almost all of the factors that there is to AI which is a good thing. From how it all started and how it is still affecting people in the current world that we live in. It's definitely something that has been used by various tech industries. However, I feel that you are mostly focusing on how humans are affected by this . My suggestion would be to focus more on how this is being used as jobs as that's how many people use it. Just as I was doing my research on Cyber security, I focused more on how people use some factors off that topic and how they use them when working in tech companies. In terms of putting AI into an RPG like game, while you are mostly focusing on how the AI itself affects humans, I would like to see something like people who like to use AI and those that don't and in the process of doing that people will be able to clearly distinguish the differences. Other than that, your idea of this RPG game sounds great to me.

I like how you are talking about this topic as it is very important in various scenarios in the real world. Not everyone in life has enough money to be able to live inside homes because of the increase in housing costs. Because of this some people end up laying in the streets without a place a to live and end up begging for money. I know you haven't talked much about this topic yet but I would like to see what other research you continue to collect so you can make a proper renting game. I don't know much about housing crisis since I grew up with a wealthy family, but some questions I would ask myself for the people out there that can't afford to buy homes with the increase in rent would be: How can I find a way to make myself survive against the rising housing crisis?, What methods are out there that I can use? I'm interested to hear how you will turn all of this into a game. Perhaps you can have the player take on solve puzzles on finding more money and have them reach a certain amount to finish the game.

I enjoy the many ways you look into this concept. It's always a great idea to share information of how first aid works here in Canada. In other words, I like how you are looking into the Good Samaritan laws for a game like this one. I never knew much about this until I read it up on your post. Not all of us are willing to offer immediate medical attention, therefore, it could really affect the lives of many people across Canada. This also allows civilian assistance to react as quickly as possible. Given you have experience with first aid, I'm curious of how you can put these first aid factors into a game. Many people's lives could be at risk if we refuse to come to their aid so perhaps you could make a game of where you solve some puzzles to make a kind of life saving game which would perfectly align with your topic. In the process, this would also help people learn the ways of basic life saving problems in an engaging manner and benefit from this a lot.