Prompt: – Write about the week’s lecture and readings as they relate to your project 
– Write about this week’s industry guest speakers (if any)
-Write a description of your progress (both positive and negative) on your current project
– Must include at least one piece of media:
GIF, link to video, screenshot, sketch, etc.

Not gonna lie, I’m nervous. I’ve had bad luck with duo projects. I’m far more comfortable either doing everything myself, thus giving myself control of every part of the game creation, or working in a giant team of 40+ developers where I can serve as a tiny cog in a giant machine. Luckily, Tyler doesn’t look like one to fall into the normal problem where one teammate never does any work. He’s slightly coding-focused, (more than me at least) meaning he can bear the brunt of that element. He’s also proven open to hearing ideas while also suggesting his own, a great balance that too many people lack. I can suggest things and know that he won’t smother his own ideas and blindly accept mine, or alternately throw mine out in favor of his own without due consideration.

Our cooperative skills were put to the test almost immediately, when we initially couldn’t decide what angle to take the game. After we missed our emotion of choice and had to settle for Calmness, we both developed different ideas for how to tackle our new direction. He wanted to adapt our ‘Nostalgia’ ideas (a basketball-style minigame in an office setting with crumpled pieces of paper) into a form that emphasized the new emotion, whereas I wanted to scrap the whole angle in favor of a new setting that was tailored for calmness from the word go (a peaceful field where clicking objects adds different instruments to the background music). Ultimately we came to an agreement and decided to stick with doing his because my suggestion was lacking in several elements of what makes a game (more on this in the final paragraph of this diary). Tyler’s idea still works, even if it chose a less obvious setting; we’ll just need to succeed at establishing calmness through gameplay instead of aesthetics. Plus office supplies are quicker to draw than naturey stuff, and I’m singly responsible for all sprite creation so I need to work fulltime on that because nothing else can progress until we have assets to work with.

Update: I kicked ass on sprites tonight! We got all the core sprites now, I’ll work on including more of course, but for now we’re easily on the road for a working prototype come the Friday playtesting.

The reading and lectures this week were mostly concerned with the elements of gaming as a medium, and they became very important in how Patrick and I chose which idea to go with. Particularly Objective and Conflict; my ‘nature-themed music generator’ idea lacked both of these core gaming elements, and for that reason wasn’t really selling itself as a completed concept. Tyler’s idea, with a stress meter and an element of time management, was more clearly a game by definition, and this factored heavily into why we ultimately chose his idea to move forward on developing.