Success:

During the duration of 4 weeks, our team was always ahead of schedule. This is mainly due to the fact that we had frequent discussions with each other on discord. In addition to that, we plan out what we want/need to accomplish every Sunday night and then assign tasks to each member. Since we were ahead of schedule, we were also able to implement stuff that were considered "extra", stuff that we might add in the future (upgrades, minimap, etc.). We had three people working on the sprites together and we were able to create a unified look.

Challenges:

There were some challenges with creating the script for generating obstacles. Playing around with the new Unity input system was also a challenge. Using object-oriented programming always proved to be tricky. The main thing we had trouble with was sprite consistency. Since there were three people working on the sprites, we had to decide what kind of style we want and how to make sure it looked consistent throughout the game. We were able to do so by settling on one style: black-lining and minimal shading. Another challenge we had was trying to make the game more player-friendly (which we did with having different difficulty modes).

Lessons Learned:

We learned that effective communication is really important when working with a team. When you have a clear idea and concept of what you want to create, it's easier to follow through. In addition, there are a multitude of things we learned to do on Unity such as how "xxxCast" is for directional detection while "Overlapxxx" is for regional detection, screen real estate on mobile is limited so excessive UI and text elements looks cluttered and messy, etc. 

Future Iterations:

1. Add different open-world maps
2. Have more destinations
3. Have more package variation
4. Create more NPCs
5. Expand more on the NPCs' role in the game
6. Implement more obstacle type variation
7. Include more animations 
8. Add more sound effects
9. Change background music for different destinations
10. Improve menu visuals

For the future, our focus would be on polishing the core of what we have currently. This mainly includes refining the artwork for the game and adding more diversity in terms of visual and audio elements. More work could also be done to have more NPCs and packages for the player to interact with. The role of the NPCs could also be expanded so their interactions with the player are not limited to merely a few lines of text bubble speech. Overall, improvements could be made to add more variation and diversity for the player's experience.