Our game has come a long way since its inception back in January. This week has served as no greater example of the progress we've made and how far we've come since then. For starters, this week was the first week back since spring break, which for most people, was a time to relax and destress from school. For us, however, our demo was fast approaching and there was still a lot of work to get done, so the first week back was jam-packed with tasks and objectives to get done. 

As lead programmer for my team, my tasks were doubled as a result of it, since I was handling both my tasks as well as managing my team. Our main priorities were to 1) Get the first minigame working since it had to be revised greatly from the state it was in originally, 2) Implement scoring systems that saved scores for each minigame and 3) Implement difficulty scaling for easy, medium and hard modes for each minigame. Most of us also had bug fixes of our own to take care of before the demo build as well, but these three were our top priorities across the entire programming team. My own goals for this week were to handle all of that, while also implementing scoring systems, difficulty scaling, and bug fixes in the asteroids minigame, which is the game I've been assigned to work on for the majority of the semester. While I expected the latter two objectives to be the ones that took the longest, it was actually the first that gave us the most trouble. 

My team and I worked for hours both inside of class and out to attempt to bug fix many of the issues present in the packing minigame (ex. packages overlapping each other, setting a limit to how many packages spawn, centering of some of the packages, etc.). Nevertheless, it was as if we were getting nowhere. The lack of progress on this game alone took a toll on us, heightening tensions within the group and just leaving us frustrated and hopeless. Despite all these setbacks, we didn't give in. We looked back at many of the tutorials that our programmer Brianna was consulting to build her game, referenced her scripts, rewrote and moved around some methods and values, and ended up pulling it off. We finally had a working product, just in time for a demo test build for the designers to playtest beforehand. 

Getting this game completed and working definitely served as a boost for our morale, allowing us to get the majority of our tasks done for the test build and for the demo presentation today. While there was still some bugs and glitches present that weren't able to get resolved in time (ex. scenes freezing on a second playthrough, player taking damage when not hit, timer issues, etc.) the product that we ended showing off really impressed both our professor and the guests who came to observe our demo presentation. It really showed how hard both my team and I worked on each of our games and making sure it all fit together and played well. I think it's safe for me to say that I'm more than proud of how far we've come and the amount of effort we've put into this. This isn't the end, however, and there's still plenty more game to get done. In my eyes, if we keep going at the pace we're at and finish strong, Space Mail is truly going to be a spectacular game and I can't wait to see it.