Finishing up Phase three

Phase three was a rocky road in regards to workflow, changing stratagies in the middle of the phase and getting use to working in a large team cohesively was difficult and still needs work, I am still not overly happy with my own work and will be adressing this over the next two weeks, as there are several elements I wish to improve such as how I lay out my work, general methods of approach in regards to sprint extercises, I want to work faster and create more stuff as I feel I am generally slow at producing work. I want to begin working on more visuals and sound scapes from now on as well as just text however I believe my work will improve as we move away from research as this is generally my weakest area of design.

In regards to the project, after our presentation we met to decide on one game to go forward with, at this point we had three designs, game one that focuses on indirect connection and how things like legacy could work as a concept, game two that looks at communication being the primary method of forming connections. Three was the idea of expecting to find company and not finding it, this follows the idea of emptiness and not finding it, a reflective look at loneliness. After our presentation we decided on going forward with game two, that music is universally used a medium to communicate. By playing music together a connection is built and thus one becomes less lonely, this is essentially the premise of the game. I feel that is general the first idea had more potential as a game, as a possibly untapped genre it was innovative and exciting. However as a game, it was less formed and generally the gameplay lacked and at the end of phase three I choose to take an idea from it's point of development rather than it's future potential and this is idea two. I am both excited to work on this while equally being apprehensive. I love music in games and the idea of creating a unique ambience within the game, as well as creating something that others want to play generally interests me, if I were to critically evaluate the basis of this game, my concerns are about technical skills fitting the project, our only expereience with music so far is my own work creating music and I wish to work on 3D visuals and music as a secondary this year because as much as I like writing music for games, I have little interest in persuing this professionally in an industry. Furthermore, generally, I feel at the moment our current design principally lacks innovation, there is nothing in this idea that is trying anything new as of so far and although that's not necessarily a bad thing it's something I'd like to work on. In conclusion to this idea, it has potential but it's going to be a lot of work and smart thinking to turn this from a potentially good game to a difinitively good game.

Team moral was low going int week 4, we'd taken a hit the friday before with structure and realising that our generation of work was slow in general. With added pressure from the presentation coming up at the end of the week, this low moral turned to stress. With Feedback from James on Tuesday doing as much harm to our ideas as good, we spent the tuesday working on different parts of our ideas, splitting up and working around different things, Dean and Bernie worked on creating a third idea, Ella worked on developing visual research for the third idea while I worked on restructuring the first idea with new ideas and possible gameplay as well as beginning to look at 3D pipelines. towards the end of the week we wrapped up work and began work on figuring out how to communicate this all back in a presentation format, I wasn't too concerned as I knew that the decisions we reached are based on actual reasons and research. After a full day and Dean putting together the presentation after we collated everything on discord and went through everythingas a group. we had finished. Moving over to the presentation, it was fairly painless. Moving forward with idea two into phase four, we must now outline a games project preposal.