As we approach production, our team has met to reassess our resources and goals.

Before the new year, our game was fairly small in scope, with a team that had each area of development covered. Some areas were seen as having a lighter workload, especially down the line, and we came up with a system to allocate efforts in lighter areas in order to assist heavier tasks.

Unfortunately, we've run into the scenario of losing contact with a team member, who happened to be in charge of programming - a field we deemed to be one of the heavier aspects of development.

Our first approach was to keep our scope. It was already small enough, and to redesign core elements may cost us more time than needed. In order to make up for a missing member, we've reorganized the responsibilities of the production manager - myself - in order to focus as well on programming. My confidence in programming in the chosen engine Unity is not terrible, but not as ideal as I would have hoped for. Our team then did a bit of research to find a different engine and chose to focus on Godot. We would give it a test run to see how it felt, and after quickly putting together a functional menu and level select, I felt more confident in my abilities to help my team as a lead progammer.

Later, our Narrative and Art lead brought up a different approach to our gameplay. As we discussed, we came up with a revised gameplay system - one that we believe manages to simplify the core gameplay loop, adds more weight to player actions, and manages to combine our then-current system of Product Profiles with our first premise of Character Profiles.

Previously, we would have players determine the validity of a news article based on their given product while also managing social media reception, and have the option to push out misleading articles for more money at the risk of losing trust. The gameplay was simple, it fit the message, but it felt fairly weightless. Our new approach is more straightforward, focusing on one customer profile and chossing which of the few products in each level they should advertise to the customer. This removes the multitasking and emphasizes the focus towards picking the right product, or the most expensive product they can get away with. The themes are the same, but it feels more personal and directly involved with morally ambiguous decisions. Plus, it simplifies the narrative content to be more directly connected to gameplay without programming in an active user feed.

With a reorganized approach to development and gameplay, someadjustements need to be made to our schedule. But overall, despite our setbacks, we remain on track!