Reflecting on my time being designer for this team, I can confidently say that I LOVED my role and I loved my team. Together, we worked very hard on a project that I am so proud of, and I can't express my gratitude enough for their hard work throughout the semester. So first of all, a huge thanks and cheers to my team for all of their contributions!

As for being designer, at the beginning of the semester when we were talking about ideas for our game, I felt so inspired by all of my team's wonderful ideas. From the get-go, we knew we wanted to learn into the narrative mystery aspect of a game because that just felt the most intriguing to all of us. From there, I had to think a lot about the different clues we'd have to create and what kind of narrative story we wanted. Luckily, our producer had already thought about this and gave us a document of a narrative to work off on. From there, I started our design document and made that home base for all of the information about Don't Fear Death that we wanted from silhouettes of our suspects and victims, making a timeline with photos, etc. This was a big part of planning and I think I did very well on it given that Canva has so many different graphics to use for free!

One of the design choices we made as a team was that we wanted to include a backyard and possibly a second floor to our map. It would have been really cool to have a second floor because we could add  more rooms, and then we were also thinking of having a shed and a garden in the backyard. However, due to time constraints and worries that the file for the game would be too big, we had to let go of this dream. We just knew that it would have made our game too laggy, and we also didn't want to overwhelm the player with too many additional clues, especially because we wanted the game to be based off of memory (or, having the player write down clues on their own sheet of paper in real life like a real detective)! Thus, we decided to design a one story house and not include an outdoor option.

Towards the middle of the project, I felt a little bit more stumped because creating clues was a lot harder than I thought. While my other teammates took care of the notes and text message clues, I was tasked to creating the official documents like the case reports and autopsies. I felt like this was difficult because I had never seen a real case report paper, so I had to look up a lot of templates online and see what would look best in our game. From a design standpoint, I was also afraid that my papers would look horribly out of place from the dark and dingy vibe we were going for, but I assumed since they were official documents, it would be okay for the papers to look clean and official. So I worked my best on these and was pretty satisfied with what I came out with!

Something that I personally struggled with in this project was definitely communication and time management. Since it was my last semester of undergrad, I had a lot of work I had to do in other classes, and unfortunately I felt a little behind in my graphics and design choices. However, I was able to lean on my teammates a lot for this, I just wish that I communicated that I was struggling with time so that they would have a better idea of where I went when I was MIA during class, haha. Otherwise, I feel like everything else went relatively smoothly! We all agreed on what kind of game we wanted to make and were all openminded to everyone's ideas. My team made it really easy to design something so awesome, so I owe all of my work to their encouragement.