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.