Devlog 2 - Production

So far, production has been going quite well, although we seem to be completing things in a different order than what was planned. By this time, we were planning on finishing the entire narrative along with all the character designs, before working on the functionality during and after the reading week.  What  happened instead was that we finished the background artwork and two character designs, almost all the UI artwork, a rough draft of the whole narrative, and included almost everything into the Unity project. 

However, there are some ups and downs related to our game's development. The positives is that implementing everything into Fungus was a lot easier to learn than I personally thought, and making changes in terms of functionality takes relatively little effort. In the image at the top, you can see that there is very little programming that is required, and we can instead just quickly adjust what is in individual blocks with high-level scripting. However, where  our ambition lies is in our game's narrative, which is being overseen by me, Michael, and Jichen. We are all trying to write a narrative that educates basic financial literacy with a cutesy aesthetic, while also communicating a political message.

This is where our struggles are found. So far, according to a good chunk of our playtests, we are relatively able to communicate basic financial literacy, but our political messaging can only be picked up by a small handful of people  who are particularly interested in our game's subject matter. This is frustrating to me, because we also want our political messaging to be picked up even by those who are not as interested in our game's subject matter without being overtly on-the-nose. Most likely, the goal of succeeding at that for everybody will be impossible, but we will do our best until the end of the semester.