Semester Post Mortem

Semester Post Mortem

* Where did you begin, and where did you end up?

It feels like I was another person when we started this project. I would never have guessed that we were going to make a rhythm game that uses a guitar controller and a dance pad when we started the semester. We actually made plans for the kind of game at the end of junior year. We didn't end up following the plan at all but that's probably for the best.

When we made our plans we were fresh off working on a very asymmetric slow horror game that wasn't particularly fun until the very end. After that we wanted to make something fast and action packed that would be fun to play and to work on. When we had to come up with 20 ideas we came up with 15 solid ideas for games that were fast and action packed. 4 bad ideas and we still needed one more so I suggested a game that is controlled with a guitar hero controller and a dance pad so that we could be done. It was an idea that has been rattling around in the collective conscious for a while so I figured someone had already made a game with that concept. 

Obviously we ended up going with that idea but we never would've if we hadn't prototyped two other concepts and realized that they weren't working out. We were only required to make two prototypes but we took the risk and decided to make three to assure we'd end up working on something we'd enjoy working on. This was a good move since Guitar Dancer was our third choice and would've not been prototyped. 

Deciding what game we were going to work on wasn't easy but once we got started on Dan Shredder I saw buy in from the team that I've never seen before on any team I've worked on. Everyone worked long hours to get the game to where it is today. Thanks to that we now have a very good game early build, an expanded team, and a lot of work ahead of us.

* How did you, in your individual role, contribute to the creative process of the team?

I came up with the idea to use the controllers but I my original vision for the game is nothing like what we have now. That's a good thing. That's not my job for good reasons and I needed the buy in from the team and make it the teams idea, not mine. We had lots of design meetings early on and everyone participated in those fully in order to design the game before we got into full-swing production. I can't remember the specifics of what I contributed but I know I did as did everyone else. I also wrote the majority of the dialogue and made the name because I was qualified to do that and it gave me something to work on during the work meetings. I did a good job with it I think despite the fact that I assigned those tasks to myself for utilitarian reasons.

* Describe an instance (or more, but one will suffice) in which your contribution required you to think deeply about how another member of your team was approaching his or her tasks? That is, describe the understanding about another facet of the game development that you achieved—not merely what another team member asked of you—to complete your task effectively?

I don't really do deep thinking. I'm a pretty shallow person to be completely honest. One night I stayed up with the programmer just to make sure he got his work done. It was entirely self interested but everyone acted like I did something great by staying up to peer pressure him into doing work. We both had the same interests though so he really respected me for just staying in the labs. I guess what I learned from that was that people can appreciate pressure, which is good to know as a manager.

* Why did you make certain key decisions (describe at least three of them) throughout the course of the semester?

1. Why did we make 3 prototypes?
Fear, we were afraid of being committed to a project we didn't enjoy working on. We were just playing it as safe as we could while still being able to meet the challenges.

2. Why did we choose to work on Dan Shredder over the other games?

One of the games wasn't coming together design wise. No one could agree on what the game should be and it was clear that we weren't coming together. The other game was boring compared to Dan Shredder. Dan Shredder we knew would turn heads even if it failed spectacularly.

3. Why didn't we have fixed meeting times late into production?

We were working very well without them and doing the same thing at the same time every week makes it less fun. If things started spiraling out of control I would've held fixed time work meetings.

4. Why is the plot of the game what it is?

We were running late on our milestones so we grabbed the most obvious narrative and ran with it. This is an example of something that could've gone very badly.

* What takeaways do you have from this semester as you head into production mode next semester? Address this question by discussing lessons learned—either through success or failure or something in between—more than technical skills developed.

I feel like I'm an alright producer now. I think this can largely be attributed to not being on a team of leftovers for the first time in my life but people are treating me with respect now so I think other people think I'm a good producer now too. I'd say the biggest reason for that is that I decided to have faith in what I've learned. There is an element of being manipulative to being a producer that I don't like. It was stopping me from doing my job: manipulating people to do their work and communicate. I got over my aversion because I realized that what I'm making people do is what they actually want to do they just need a little nudge to get over the initial inertia. 

Sprint 4: Post 1

Sprint 4: Post 1

We passed the challenge last week. We're challenging again this week. I'm tired of being tired and stressed so I suspect that everyone is. I can't show how much the stress is getting to me but it's getting hard. On the way back to my dorm room last night I kept getting startled by twigs and leaves blowing across my path. Next semester won't be easier but I'm looking forward to thanksgiving break. 

QA yesterday was a bit of a mess. We spent all this time making a new level and then it ended up breaking last minute.  We ended up at QA an hour late and with a different build than what we wanted to test. I know that I should've held the team to having everything ready earlier but they have other classes as well. One way or another next semester can't work like this if we go forward. I'm going to write a plan for next semester after this and I need to run things with a structure less based on basically working really hard on the weekends right before the presentation. Not everyone works their best that way. It's worked well for the current team and we just kind of fell into it once we had our direction completely figured out. 

I'm pretty confident that our pitch will turn out pretty well but it's going to take some doing to get the visuals and video finished. The game is almost ready to be recorded for the video but I want some polish in the presentation that I know from experience will take some time. I'll need to go downtown to buy some stuff for that.

Some of the other senior producers are setting up a practice pitch thing the weekend before the real pitch. I hope to participate in that but I'll need to work hard to get the pitch ready before the weekend. I'm worried I'll choke in practice because I never don't choke during a practice run. The last time I did a pitch in the alumni auditorium was the elevator pitch and that was embarrassing to the max. I regret thinking about that.

The fact that I haven't really written about the state of the game yet is actually a good thing. Everything looks to be on track to have almost everything we wanted in for the show. That's really the best one can hope for. 

Sprint 3: Post 2

Sprint 3: Post 2

I've mainly been iterating on the presentation this week. It was nice being able to improve a presentation instead of just starting one from scratch. It's difficult to make a good presentation when the stakes are so high and the ultimate judgement is based on something nebulous between checking all the boxes and making something compelling.

On Monday I presented the first iteration of the presentation I'm giving tomorrow. I botched that presentation when I misinterpreted a signal from the professor as a signal to hurry up. I gave a very condensed version of the presentation so the feedback I got wasn't exactly relevant to the very rehearsed, thought out presentation I had planned. If only I knew what I should trim specifically. 

We're doing a practice presentation immediately before class with one of the professors so we'll have like 30 minutes to make adjustments to the presentation before class. I am hoping that he just says "perfect" but that's unlikely.

How's the game going though? It's good. We're going to have some new enemy types in on the presentation as well as some new music, sound, and UI. The new enemy types are the biggest addition since that changes how you play the game but the other stuff makes the game more enjoyable. 

We're getting our stuff together on the agile side. We were doing stories incorrectly but we'll be doing it properly from now on. I want to at least appear organized so that if we get a bigger team they'll feel good about joining a team that is serious biznu.

Sprint 3: Post 1

Sprint 3: Post 1

I've simmered down now but if I had written this blog post earlier I would've been complaining about the QA process the whole post. Signing up for the QA lab has changed this year and the way it has changed has resulted in some undesirable results. Anyways it finally culminated in me signing up for QA well in advance and not getting approved until the day before while I was taking a nap. All the QA lab slots were sniped out from beneath me during that hour long nap. Anyways the problems with QA have prevented us from challenging this week. My description might make it seem like it's entirely my fault but there was some cheating involved in grabbing the QA slots from beneath me.

Since we aren't challenging this week we are doing a faux-challenge presentation. A challenge presentation to get feedback on without having any chance of actually passing. This'll prepare us for the real challenge a week from now. Since we have no chance of actually passing I want to get a little experimental with the presentation. The last presentation was over-detailed and overly long like twice the length it was supposed to be at least so this one has to be much shorter . We were also told to make it an actually good presentation. This presentation is going to be much shorter and have an edited video possibly with narration to show off game mechanics. One criticism was our game mechanics are confusing to describe so it'd be better to just show them. That we hope to rectify with the use of a video for the game mechanics.

Overall this week has been pretty slow for getting stuff done. We wanted to get all the enemy types in this week but that didn't happen at all. To be fair that may have been to lofty a goal for one week and everyone is still working their 12 hours it's just that the weeks we made significant progress were the weeks that people were working like 40 hours unsurprisingly. I think I might be doing a bad job as a producer if people are working that many hours but from what I've heard from other teams that's pretty standard. Still, at least one of the things that ended up sucking up a huge amount of time this week didn't help us towards this week's sprint at all and I probably should've said to hold off on that and throw it in the backlog although at this point it might be better just to finish it.

Sprint 2: Post 3

Sprint 2: Post 3

It's the day before we challenge the deep dive phase and tensions are running high. We are already one week behind schedule and many teams before us failed the deep dive challenge. We learned from the teams that failed that the reason they failed was because they didn't focus enough on the cultural requirement of the deep dive challenge. The requirement wasn't clear in the syllabus and that resulted in many angry men and women. I've been doing research to prepare for this requirement since I learned of the other team's failures but I am still very nervous.

Our game has made major visible progress this week. Last week we got the easy track making in and this week we got the sound of the music to play synced up with the note chart and the note chard looks good and functions and we have actual art in and it's actually a game. It's great and already kind of fun. We need to get more dance pad input integrated into the game but the guitar stuff is basically done. It doesn't have all the features guitar hero has but we don't think we need those since we aren't making guitar hero. 

We hope to have all the enemies in and functioning by the end of next week. A lot of the stuff between combat encounters is very important but ultimately it is mostly aesthetic. It'll definitely be in before the end of the semester. Everyone has been firing on all cylinders for like 2 weeks now and I love it. We made some mistakes this week but I think we will be challenging tomorrow and I think we'll pass.

Sprint 2: Post 2

Sprint 2: Post 2

This was meant to be the final blog of this sprint. It isn't. We underestimated the amount of time required to finish the stories in this sprint and as a result we didn't have a build to test so I ended up being unable to QA test and that's a major requirement for the challenge for the next phase. We meant to challenge tomorrow but we have to push the challenge back to next week. 

Since we aren't challenging this week we'll need to challenge at every opportunity to reach the stage we have to be at in order to assure qualification for the final presentation. It's possible that we can qualify just from approval from faculty members but I don't want to rely on that. I think we can do it but we're going to need to work harder than we ever have before. I know I personally have been working harder than I ever have. This weekend I've woken up, gone to a work meeting and then gone home. I'm not complaining, I'm just saying we have a good start on the working very hard situation. The rest of the team says that they work on other classes during the week so I can't just schedule a work meeting every day unfortunately. People work very well during work meetings and if my assessment of their pace during work meetings is correct I'm sure we could reach our milestones easily if we had reasonable length work meetings as often as possible.

We need to ramp it up and I need to figure out how to do so in a way that doesn't kill the team and make them hate me. Work meetings don't make them hate me since I'm also there working and it builds camaraderie because they know I'm not just a lazy that sits atop my tower telling them what to do.

Sprint 2: Post 1

Sprint 2: Post 1

We passed the 1st challenge. We're looking to challenge the next stage a week from now. We passed the last challenge without too much trouble but we were rather late to the challenging party. I'm not too concerned as to us taking a bit longer, we had three ideas that we really liked and it took a bit of doing to decide on one. That sprint was strange and slightly incomparable to the one we're in now. I'm happy we passed the challenge.

We've actually planned this sprint using stories before we started so that'll help with the team direction and planning. We've only planned out this sprint though, we'll need a long meeting to plan out further. I hear those meetings can be like pulling teeth but communication is reasonably easy within my team so I think the release planning will be challenging but doable. I'm going to be finally getting my notes off of facebook soon and begin the transition onto slack. I fear that'll make the team less likely to read the notes but they'll just need to get over that and adjust to the new system. You shouldn't use facebook for business stuff outside of advertising. 

Sprint 1: Post 4

Sprint 1: Post 4

I'm currently in a meeting with my team. We're all doing our blog posts. It's pretty down to the wire with this one. We need to challenge tomorrow and we still haven't decided what game we're going forward with. We're getting close but we're taking a break right now. It's very stressful so I must ask myself: How did it come to this?

We didn't get prototypes to a point worth testing until late in the week. This left me the weekend to test and I was able to get in the lab but I didn't get to test one of the prototypes in the lab due to technical difficulties related to Git. I got the build working hours after QA but it was too late and then I was stuck with testing informally. I got some good feedback but it wasn't enough to sway the decisions at the end here. This crisis probably won't happen in the future because we'll have builds that are more iterative so we'll get it to the testing stage and then build in that. Overall I think we're doing fine. I'm the only one that seems like they're cramming more than they should be. When we are at a crossroads that each path goes super long it's hard to chart a course that works both ways. I'm excited to actually know what our project is but right now I'm at code yellow. The project overall is code green.

Sprint 1: Post 3

Sprint 1: Post 3

We intended to challenge this Monday but we have to push things back a week. We dropped one of the prototypes so that we could stop developing it. It was easy to do I suppose it was good we went forward with 3 games since if we hadn't we probably would only have one we want to be working on and one that's a skeleton, only being developed to meet to requirements. 

Morale is still high enough in the team. The designer is starting to settle into developing the games we have and no one seems afraid to speak up when they have concerns. I hope we can maintain that. We really need to start getting our builds to QA though. We only have two games now but that's still 4 test sessions in a period that has 3 official QA slots. I'll get a build asap to have for testing. I'd like to spend some quality time with the build and design documentation before I make a test plan. I think that once we get on a more direct path with shorter sprints we'll hit our deadlines better.

Sprint 1: Post 2

Sprint 1: Post 2

Our three ideas are moving forward slowly but despite the fact that the ideas we had grabbed the attention and imagination of the audience we didn't really have the cohesive vision that we needed to make the prototypes at first. Part of the reason for this is that the ideas that the audience really liked were all ideas I came up with. This puts the designer in a difficult position since he would normally be designing the game and then putting the ideas into a form that can communicate to the rest of the team what he is thinking. I was a fool to not foresee this. 

I'm trying my hardest to encourage my designer to take the reins. The least understood vision is the KDOS project. I made a presentation for my team showing off all the ideas that had been proposed on how to approach the execution of the gameplay. We took elements from each of the ideas to create something everyone was happy with and seemed fun. Everyone was pretty confident in what needed to be done after that meeting. 

We had another meeting later in the week just to see what people had achieved thus far. Everyone said that they hadn't worked on it much in the few days between meetings. We decided to move the meeting one day later to give them more time to have something to show at the meeting. I hope that works.

Sprint 1: Post 1

Dawn has broken on a new year and with it comes a new project. My team is all people that I've worked with before... finally. I know they are all capable of great work. The stakes are higher than they've ever been before with this project but I'm confident we'll be able to make something that'll impress.
We have to explore at least two concepts seriously. We have to really think critically about the viability of the concepts and make playable prototypes of them. We got feedback on our 20 quick and dirty ideas. If the quick and dirty idea doesn't engage people odds are the idea isn't that great. There were 2 ideas that stuck out to the crowd of game students. They were Shishkebab: The Game of Impaling People on a Lance, and Katamari Damacy of Speed: The Game of Sticking Cars Together on the Highway to Go Faster. We decided to take three ideas forward, the two crowd favorites and a game that some of the team really liked and was slightly less of a crowd favorite but was still well received.
I made the first sprint last 4 weeks and involve prototyping and making concept concept art all three of the ideas in any order.  I realized after the sprint had started that it isn't exactly how prototyping sprints should be done according to the experts. I think that there are merits to doing it this way though. There are no barriers that prevent you from going back which is usually a bad thing but in this case I think it'll work well. Inspiration can strike at any time during these highly creative times and I think this might work.