New Beginnings - Zen Boat

Here we go. Final teams are in place and while Maze Junkies didn't survive into the top 4 this year, I'm optimistic for the future. I had a great time being with everyone else on the MJ prototype team, to everyone who I worked with to get our prototype and presentation organized, thank you.

I'm very grateful to announce I am the Team Lead for the Zen Boat team. There are a number of reasons I'm thankful to be a part of this group and I'll list a few of them below:

• I get to be a Team Lead again: 
• As I stated in one of my blog posts before, my goal after I graduate is to get a job as a Producer or Lead in the game or tech industry. One of the largest reasons I came back to do the capstone again was because of the experience I had being a Team Lead. I'm so thankful that I was selected for this project and I'm eager to use my skills to make this game the best it can be.
• The group I'm working with is awesome:
• I got a really good feeling from my first impression with the group. There is a good balance of skills and past experiences, but the one thing that connected us all immediately was everyone's eagerness to work on this project. I'm not sure I've ever seen a team translate so quickly from the final selection process to pre-production on a new project, but I'm very optimistic.
• The Zen Boat game:
• Zen Boat was in my top three choices for several reasons. I think that the concept is simple, but open for strong design and development. The pitch was unique with strong direction from Ellis who I'm excited is going to be the Lead Designer on the game. I just think that the boat idea is really easy to understand and has a lot of room for creativity moving forward.

My first step as producer was to get everyone's information and backgrounds. Then, as a group, we decided that we needed to research and play games similar to Zen Boat we could design out our current game.