Since all of the team members had lives outside of school, we had to schedule meetings on AIM and make private chat rooms; this worked really well, although we only had to do it early on.

When we had the game out for people to play on the demo day, they seemed to really enjoy it.

All of the team members managed to get work done on time. At times we were rushing to get things done (our board with concept artwork was being worked on 30 minutes before the demo day began), but we managed to get a real nice set-up with the Battle Royale movie going on a monitor behind the laptop that the demo was loaded on.

After testing our game in front of our class, I managed to write and design an introductory cut-scene that functioned as a partial tutorial on how to plan the game. This made things much easier for game players that were not old-school RPG fans.

I uploaded four different builds of the game online on my web-site, which allowed the team to play through the demo as I was programming/designing it. This was very useful because I got some outside perspectives on parts that were confusing about the design, dialogue, etc.

Initially, my duties were just to be the Programmer of the group. For various reasons, I also became the Designer and managed to heavily rewrite a lot of the script. I realized I was going to be the Designer because I had to lay out all of the areas of the game using lots of the default graphics that came with RPG Maker 2003. That wasn't a problem. I felt bad about heavily rewriting the script, although I notified Nate that I was going to do this and initially there wasn't a problem. I thought I could improve the dialogue by adding humor to it and making the "choices" in the dialogue trees more dynamic so they could affect events later in the game. I probably added too much humor, which Nate wisely advised me to tone down in the final version; the humor isn't toned down as much as I would have liked to do in the revision, but we were pressed for time.

I must have been really annoying to our Producer, Patrick, who was patient enough to listen to me sending him endless Instant Messages throughout the process. I guess that's what a Producer was supposed to do, but he helped support me by telling me I was doing a good job, even when I was convinced things weren't going so well (working 40-50 hours on a project while you have 2 other classes tends to drain you of energy and common sense).

I should have sent a revised version of the script (although I changed the dialogue all in-engine) to Will, our lead artist. He created some artwork that wasn't necessary because of changes in the script. My revisions in the script involved me taking the locations from Nate's script and completely rewriting all of the dialogue, with a few exceptions. If I had written out a revised script in screenplay format and given it out to all the members of the team, we could have avoided some problems.

When the guest speaker from Acclaim came and saw our demo, he was confused by the opening cut-scene, saying he didn't get the game. This might have been a sign that RPGs are still pretty niche; ironically, earlier that day he pointed out that RPG sales only count for 10 % of all American console game sales. He wanted to see flowcharts of the dialogue trees, which we didn't have, although he seemed to like our presentation overall from an aesthetic standpoint.

Battle Royale: The RPG turned out very well, all things considered. It is certainly representative of a genre of game I would be very interesting in designing: the console RPG.

Working on a team environment was certainly interesting. If I had been more clear with changes in the script, things would have flowed along a bit more smoothly. This demo was a learning experience.