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.