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.