To say I was disappointed at the end of our last sprint would be an understatement. I really had hoped to nail down one concept then (with class feedback and team vigor) to move forward with and really start concept production and prototyping. That wasn't the case. The team found ourselves evenly deadlocked between both our game concept ideas; the Western needed a viable mechanic of gameplay, the Atom-punk game needed more heart and narrative. Ultimately, we decided to focus this week on adding both of those to the game concepts respectively. We dived deeper into design research for detective games (for our Western concept) and our designer put down some thoughts on fleshing out the Atom-punk world and gameplay structure. Because of the nature of the work, our programmers were left to continue iterating on the Atom-punk game since that was the only one that had a solid, testable mechanic. The team determined that this would be the week we chose one concept or the other, no matter what.
Unfortunately, beyond that, it left little for me to do as the producer on this project again. I was looking forward to diving more deeply into marketing but without direction, that would be a waste of time and resource. Luckily, I did find one thing to focus on that will be useful; the semester's overall timeline. I created a spreadsheet showing the rest of the semesters weeks (formatted into sprint timeline) and, using the syllabus, attempted to set up an ideal schedule of general progress for my team to follow. This primarily focused on documentation and completing presentations for our teacher to judge...er, review. Take a look.
Using this, I hope to help establish more concrete due dates and plans for the team to follow in the coming weeks.
Because I am writing this post at the end of the week, I can tell you that the team did come together and decide on our final game concept to push forward with. Oddly enough, it was a unanimous decision too - we are going forward with the Atom-punk game concept. This was largely because, even with some mechanics fleshed out for the Western game concept, there were still a vast amount of unknowns that we couldn't account for. Call it risk that we simply were unsure of how to even begin to counter. Beyond that, our designer was already tiring on the concept and wasn't sure she really wanted to push forward with it for another few months. It was a breath of fresh air to me that we all felt the same way in the end for this decision. Now I can really start to shine as a producer. Diving into marketing next week and the week after in hopes of getting some real, valuable data in terms of target and demographics. The team is overall very excited with this idea and already feel that it is achievable yet with an appropriate amount of risk to not be safe either. Time will tell. For now, this is when we truly begin.
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