Devlog #9: Final Project Prototype Continued!

This week in Intermediate Game Dev...we kept working on our group projects and read this article on Microprose's Ill-Fated Darklands

This week question's/prompt's were:

1. other than a possible (probable) giant Git mess this week, how else are you feeling?
2. what are you working on this week? is there anything you don't know how to do?
3. Where did Darklands fall apart at the development level?
4. If you were in charge of Darklands' development team, what would you cut from its design? What would you keep? And why?

Fortunately, there hasn't been a single merge conflict so far with my team, so I'm feeling super great! We're making good progress overall.
This week I made a highscore board, got the bare bones of each scene up and ready, and made some sketches of some funky little creatures that might make it into the game.( Scroll all the way down to view them) 
I want to wait till class before deciding which 4 are going to actually be modeled and put into the game.
Besides that, we're starting to model environmental assets this week and also get the scoring system implemented so we can calculate how well the player takes pictures and what not. That's about it!
The only thing I don't know how to do is to make water in a 3D space all cool and animated. ( Not that it's needed right now, but it's still something!)

So for Darklands, I feel like it fell apart on a development level due to the fact certain design aspects may have been prioritized rather than prioritizing the polish and bug fixing that needs to be done before launch. I don't know the full story about what happened on the development side, and sure not every bug can be caught before a game releases, but the fact the released game crashed multiple times while trying to finish the story isn't good. If I was in charge of the team, I probably would cut some of the procedural generation that was focused on, or even just try to tweak it so it's not overwhelming and so it makes sense. I wouldn't want my team to be overworked and to not feel passionate about their working on.  Another thing I'd definitely cut is making the navigation be confusing when it doesn't need to be. While I understand the desire to make games complex, I think the basic mechanics should be easy for the player to pick up at first and just hard to master.