End of week report

Hey guys!  This is the end of week 1 of the MFAGA plan.  I'm in the middle of a dev task and will work on it some more later, but I'm about to go eat so I thought I'd post this report now.

Week 1 progress
The team only saw the MFAGA plan last Thursday (the day before it was published here), so this week we've mainly been planning implementation and making technical decisions.

There are four MFAGA objectives:

• Simplifying the avatar was the priority this week.  We redesigned the layer architecture in Illustrator, and designed a cleaner way to display the layers in-game.  We went firm on the face and body variables we're planning, and the clever and beautiful Victoria did some clever and beautiful things with 3D models and Illustrator meshes.  A feature I was expecting we'd have to cut (tweaking individual facial features, instead of just picking preset face shapes) has survived thanks to some extra planning by V.  It's looking great, and we'll have something to share with you soon.
• Removing barriers to contribution was also a focus.  I wrote a draft of the streamlined game mechanics, which the whole team is helping to improve, and Hyneman & Lara have been working on some UI & passage code streamlining.
• Improving admin I feel like I only did okay on this...C grade only (but this is an improvement on my usual standard).  I made time for team comms, wrote Patron reports daily, and am moving back towards a healthy work/life balance (because the game needs a better crab).
• Streamlining the writing is the thing I'm most excited about, but other things took priority this week.  I did make some notes and outlines on a few things, but didn't make any significant advances this week.

Random thoughts:

• I caught up on some of my comms, but I didn't get around to replying to everyone who I wanted to yet – apologies for this.
• Taking last weekend off was beneficial.  I plan to take tomorrow off, and use Sunday just for trying to get caught up with some admin/planning tasks.
• Your feedback on MFAGA and the reports has been encouraging & thought provoking.  MFAGA is still fluid on a few things; more detail to follow soon.
• The next thing we'll release is likely to be a demo of the character creator, so you can feed back on the streamlined avatar.

Okay, that's it for week 1!  I didn't keep up with all the comments on these dev posts but I intend to, so please feed back if you have ideas/questions/concerns.  Have a great weekend, everybody, next progress report will be Monday.