Dev Log #1: Pre-Production

So this was a fun start to the semester- I had originally notified my team of my intention to withdraw from the term, but then I didn't, but then communication with the Office of the Registrar got muddled, and I was enrolled two weeks late into the semester. BUT IT'S GOOD TO BE BACK.

Despite the fact that I essentially Julius Caesar'd them 3 weeks before the start of term, the Bank of Sheridan still let me back in and we quickly reviewed our updated roles and responsibilities before jumping into testing one of our first playable prototypes. As the team member responsible for the narrative design, my absence did not go unnoticed. Cody was a saint that took over narrative design while I was gone and created a rough draft for the monthly newscast cut-scenes as well as updating the character dialogue we drafted out last semester.

After updating the Gantt chart and being re-assigned a role and some tasks for the upcoming week, we started our regularly scheduled Friday morning meeting off strong. Looking back at our work from last semester, it felt like team morale was getting rather low after last semester. We had rushed through our last two assignments last semester because of disorganization within the group- we had all our tasks delegated properly, but we didn't set deadlines for ourselves, leading to a lot of last-minute rushed work, and me leaving-but-not-really at the beginning of the current semester definitely didn't help team morale at all. It felt like we were all working on our own pieces to a game with no overarching theme; however, I noticed that our team morale improved once we went over our first fully playable prototype last Friday.

As we head towards play-testing this weekend, I believe our team came out of the experience more confident in what we can accomplish. The programmers for the team are incredibly talented and compiled all our work into an enjoyable prototype. Whether or not the game is fun has yet to be decided by our playtesters, but we are confident Rat Race can accomplish its goal of educating the player on the post-pandemic economic landscape of North America.