Week 10 - Slouching and Suprise

Senior Team Week 10 (11/2-11/8)

At this point in the semester we knew that we were going to need to challenge every week to be able to be guaranteed a place at the senior show. Work continued this week but I don't think that we truly felt the urgency outside of the presentations. Looking back on this week we did not get nearly enough done even though we dealt with many of the things we needed to.

We really tried to take note of the lessons of our previous challenge attempts when we set about creating our presentation for this week. We finished the initial slides by Wednesday and revised them every meeting afterwards. We also set about scheduling Discipline reviews with various teachers for the final two weeks of the project. However we ran into one major snag on this aspect of our week, Michael and I forgot until Wednesday to contact any of the programming teachers while Kody was completely unable to contact any of the art teachers. This very nearly lead to our not having a programming discipline review and did lead to us not having an art discipline review. We expected that we would not be able to challenge because of this and the initial response from the teachers seemed to support this, but when class rolled around we were allowed to challenge the milestone. This week was stressful on the meeting front for me, I felt uncomfortable with my slides, I nearly failed to get my discipline review done and I thought we would be unable to challenge at the next class.

This week I realized that Tuesdays were not good work days for me this semester. Throughout the semester I tended to do less work on Tuesdays and would often be rather directionless. I took steps this week to counteract this by seeking out suggestions from other group members on Tuesday so I couldn't just decide things were done for the night and go home. I also made sure that I was eating enough and was full right before I started working so that I wouldn't end up in the distracted hunger state that I sometimes find myself in. We made good progress this week, many of the more persistant issues in the build were fixed and we polished menu and AI a good deal however I don't feel that we moved forward enough programmatically. Art wise, Kody churned out great assets at a rate that continues to astound me, I honestly don't think I know another artist who creates nearly so much quality work. Design work has always been an area that I struggled to keep track of and I think this was one of those weeks where knowing exactly where the designer was at and what the progress was looking like would really have helped. I felt that several of our group meetings this week were weak, we did not accomplish as much as we normally did during our work meetings.

That all said, during this week I felt the least stressed that I have ever felt during what is essentially the run up to finals week. I think that this is partly the environment of the team,  every single one of them is a good friend and a great worker. We all work well together and I enjoy working with them. I really hope that we succeed in passing the remaining stages and continuing on to next semester together. The other part is that I genuinely enjoy this game, more so and more easily than any other group project I've worked on.