What I've Learned 

All of the production courses at my school are extremely valuable. You get a team of dedicated developers with similar interests, a deadline and most importantly, consequences for missing them. Its difficult to find these values in projects online as they get started and never finished for a myriad of reasons. 

Through this course I learned:

• How to be effective in a team
  • While the team was feeling stressed with a heavy workload, we pivoted our schedule and work with our strengths allowing us to feel less stressed and capable of finishing our work that sprint
• The importance of scheduling 
  • We mapped out all our milestones and deliverables to complete our project, giving us the ability to look far into the future and make choices with them in mind; like the story above
• Why designing with goals in mind is vital
  • We used research about doom scrolling to guide our design decisions, otherwise we would be guessing  — who gets paid to guess?
• To reinforce that design has constraints (team or project)
  • We were deciding on if we should publish to Steam as well but ultimately the conversation lead to not doing so at this moment given our time constraints and Steam's certification process and the increased playtesting required; making it easier for us to polish our game and reach our goals
• How to work together on a team for a longer period of time
  
  • In highschool, students in poor groups tend to just wait it out, but on a project with dependencies it is impossible to do so over a year without being severely negatively impacted if you haven't learnt how to communicate and work together
• Developing common understanding amongst the team on everything
• Tools to do so (diagrams, screen sharing, demonstrating)

Looking Forward

As my team on Under Choices moves towards production next year we have established a strong pipeline and workflow. Our documentation is fleshed out and most importantly searchable and kept up to date. Our team morale and trust is great making it fun to work with them. The majority of our unknowns & risks about the game design  have been addressed so now our goals have shifted to staying on schedule and finishing our tasks. To aide us, our Gantt chart, JIRA and Confluence will be used for the rest of the project due to the success we have had with it so far. 

Ultimately, our goal is to create a game we are proud of, with the team remaining intact, that communicates our message of doom scrolling and hopefully one that others play. I believe we are in a strong position to do so.