Successes

• At the start, we were quick to discuss our strengths and weaknesses and assign roles and tasks based off of that.
• In terms of self organizing, we were able to consistently meet weekly to discuss problems, questions, and potential ideas moving forward, which gave us a clear idea of what to do every week.
• We found we were able to meet in the middle for a lot of our ideas and openly discuss what we wanted the game’s vision to look like.
• Overall, we were able to hit on the cute visual style that inspired this game in the first place.

Failures

• We had to keep scaling the project down to stay realistic, and this meant that we ended up cutting a lot of features for the sake of time and for our individual workloads. 
• The biggest challenge ended up being how to track the pet’s state after closing the game and combining that with real time tracking. Regrettably, we had to end up cutting this part to focus on getting the core parts (interacting with the pet and the minigames) to work.
• We initially started out with one person doing most of the coding work. However, we ran into production problems midway and needed to shift more of the coding work to another member. This caused problems since we couldn’t find a very efficient way to work in Unity together (which didn’t help since we had to also debug many parts of the game).

Lessons Learned

• From the start, it may be better to approach an ambitious project like this in increments and/or focus on delivering a very well polished vertical slice to make room in our schedule for debugging and better implementing feedback. 
• Figuring out each other’s workloads (both in and outside of this class) earlier on may have been more efficient so we could fall back on each other more easily, especially since in the middle of the process one member was slowly taking on most of the work and one member got sick. 

Next Steps

• Implementing the real time tracking system and having the pet’s status change even after the game has been closed.
• Adding more pet interactions and a walking minigame.
• Adding a shop and money function to further incentivize players to reopen the game.
• Adding in more pet options and eventually, an option to create your own pet using different parts of the pet.