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.