It’s the start of the new year and with that comes new projects and new opportunities. Unlike my previous project, I’m actually able to take a much deeper dive into Narrative Design over the next few months so I’m incredibly excited.

My name is Jeffrey Friedman, I am a Game Designer who specializes in Systems and Narrative Design.  Over these past few months, I was a part of the team RattSkum which consisted of myself, a Sound Designer, an Artist, and a Producer.  During my time on this team, I also worked as the Lead Programmer for the project.  

It’s come to the end of the semester.  I was going to write up a challenge report for Challenge Three on its own, but it was at a point in the semester where I felt it was better to wait a little longer.  A few weeks have passed since the last reflection and a lot has changed in both the game itself and the team. One of the biggest things that really rang through during these two Challenges was the general problems of actually getting a digital build going… without a programmer.  However, as was stated in the past reflection, I took up the role of Lead Programmer for this game. While I am a Designer, I do still have a decent knowledge of programming so I felt like I was ready to take on the challenge.  

Another challenge passed, another step forward for our team.  I think we’re actually doing really well for ourselves, even if it took a good chunk of time for us to fully pass this challenge.  During the time it took us to pass this, we’ve made a really solid gameplan in order to be able to present during the Senior Show. In addition to this, we took the time to create and test 3 different prototypes in order to decide what game we would be pursuing for the rest of the semester.  These three prototypes were two digital prototypes and one physical prototype. We brought all three of the games to QA and got plenty of feedback on each concept before coming to a decision. In addition to this, we also weighed the pros, cons, and the general risks of each concept against each other.  

For this first reflection, I wanted to focus heavily on the topic of group-based and individual decisions.  For this first few sprints and the general first challenge as a whole, I actually think our team has handled it fairly well.  The first thing I want to discuss was how we divided up the general task work among our group members. Given our interesting team composition of 2 Designers, 1 Producer, and 1 Artist, we’re missing a pretty important role which would be a Programmer.