First I'd like to say I'm thrilled with the game we're making, and I'm very proud of our team and all the work we've done. Hatto is adorable and I see a lot of promise in the future for this game.

At first we struggled a bit with communication, but that improved quickly (with lots of help from Mia) with regular weekly meetings and daily progress updates on Discord. All of our artists/designers have gotten accustomed to the git workflow, pushing assets and pulling latest changes to test out the build. We're proudly sitting at 3 weeks since the last git incident! In the future, I'd like to maintain much more rigid source control standards: branching for each feature, separate dev branch from (protected) master branch, etc. We've done a great job so far, but doubling our team size will require some more strict rules on this front.

Meeting deadlines was a struggle during this project, as we rarely cleared every single card from the This Week's Sprint column by the end of the week. We'd usually prioritize well and get the most important ones done, but we'll have to start setting more realistic sprint goals.

We have a lot of work to do in terms of level design, as our playtesting showed players either tapping mindlessly through each interaction to the end, or struggling to get past the initial interaction. Although we aimed to show a vertical slice of our gameplay, the level we made ended up being unfortunately linear and doesn't really demonstrate the open-ended puzzle gameplay we had in mind. However, our codebase has remained very modular and should make changes to gameplay mostly painless.

Positives:

• Great communication/team morale
• Fantastic git workflow
• Code has remained modular

Negatives:

• Puzzles not open ended
• Failed to meet weekly deadlines
• Level design too linear - needs work

I believe this project went mostly well for a game made in essentially ten (10) weeks, but has a lot more potential in many areas of production. A re-imagining of the design of the game overall needs thinking and work from another perspective. I feel like that we, as college students working on a ten-week term as well as working on other classes' coursework, are generally too busy producing work, assets, and more that we often forget about the design of the game - because the design of the game(play) is really what makes a game "fun."

Regarding the art, I feel like my biggest accomplishment during the game was creating Hatto as the main character and mascot for It's Haunt Time! I like that it took iterations to get to his final design and I believe it was the most pivotal design choice made for the game. His design and silhouette reads well and Hatto looks like a memorable character that someone can immediately recognize as the mascot for It's Haunt Time! As the art lead for the team, I feel that I've done sufficiently enough for the game in terms of creating and unifying the art style and color scheme of the art assets, feeling, and mood. I feel like despite me going nitty-gritty with the details and specifications of art assets and color scheme, I missed out on some areas that slipped my mind like specifying the sizes of art assets and cracking down on art style to be more unified. With five (5) artists on the team, it is understandable that we all have differing inherent art styles. I feel that, despite my attempts at trying to get everyone to follow one style, it was inevitable that the slight nuances of them can be seen when inspected closely. So maybe my lesson in this department is that I could play off of my team members' strengths not in terms of what they prefer to do, but in terms of what their art style lends them towards.

Working with my team members has been a pleasure and I felt that we performed as well as a team could for Game Workshop I. Of course, we have our positives and negatives and agreements and differences, but what matters is that we worked as a team and gained some team experience (as a team of 7) . I want to give a shout out for my team members for their enthusiasm for working on the game and most of their communication efforts. As always, being enthusiastic about working on something and communicating extremely frequently to the point where we are essentially fostering a tight-knit community is key to being a successful team working on a game. So, even though my game idea didn't get chosen in the beginning, I still put all my efforts into working with my teammates and making this game shine.

Things that occurred this term that I would have preferred NOT to happen was the hectic-ness of an extremely busy quarter in terms of coursework from other classes and differing opinions during the production timeline of the game. My coursework for six classes (including this one) for the past ten (10) weeks have been jam-packed and mentally and physically shattering on my health and lifestyle, and every week felt like the combination of a drag and panic-inducing state. It affected the timeline of my work, but I still strive to produce quality work because my philosophy for work is quality over quantity. In general, team members will have differences and ours is no different. Some color scheme ideas didn't get applied to all the art assets in the game despite me clearly and concisely laying out the specifications and ground rules for our assets. The Hatto design/concepts I created for the in-game sprites also doesn't match the current in-game sprites, and I've just left the problem alone since, inevitably, it wouldn't have changed in the weeks going forward. The communication of certain team members weren't up to the standard that we were expecting for our team dynamic and that produced some issues, but we have mostly worked around it.

Personally, I feel like I have a lot more experience creating art assets for 2D games than others and at some times, the idea of unifying what wasn't what I expected for certain art assets felt frustrating. Something that I feel like I forgot to clarify was the sizing of art assets and that really felt like a big time-consumer for the time I spent unifying them. I could see myself putting this as a piece on my portfolio, but I consider this a small project relative to what I want to advertise my skills as. My art skills lie more in creating complex concept designs and illustration through digital painting, so I don't feel like I grew much while working on this project. I appreciate the simplicity of the art for the game though. Because the art style was simple, I was able to reasonably produce a lot of concepts and work, despite them being small and simple.

Its haunt time was a rather enjoyable game to make. For things that went right during this game, were quite an organized group. Everyone had a role to do and it was rarely that each person didn’t know what they needed to do each week. The art style was interesting to work in; we could get a lot of iterative feedback each week and gradually improve my understanding of the “googie” style and improved my art. Last but not least, this is one of the few projects I’ve worked on where team meetings went very well. We didn’t have a set schedule, but we had almost everyone at every single meeting which in the past has been a serious problem for some projects I’ve worked on. Though not everything is perfect in group projects. The first major problem we had was being blocked by our own designs. A lot of us did work on Tuesday, but in the beginning certain things couldn’t happen before one part was completed and that ended up bogging down some of the artists. Another would be the timing of our meetings. We usually had them late on Sunday, and though everyone was there I wouldn’t be able to get a lot of work on the project done over the weekend because I didn’t have a direction to go in. The last problem I would say we had is a lack of time in for our design. Our game concept doesn’t feel like the game we have made, and I feel that if we had more time to flesh out our core concepts into a more complex idea it could stand on its own as a puzzle game. Right now it needs a hard nudge to be a true puzzle game.