Sprint 2: Concept Exploration 1

This week our goal was to develop 3 basic prototypes one for each of our sticky game ideas: Luchador Fighting, Cut Corners Farming, and Dungeon Survival Versus. Since each idea is very different, we took very different approaches for each prototype. For the Luchador Fighting game we decided to focus on creating a hit box and animation system in Unity. We focused on a simple gameplay loop for the Cut Corners Farming game in Gamemaker. And we adapted the board game Boss Monsters to play around with the initial design for the Dungeon Survival Versus game. We did this to help split up the work- our programmer could focus on the fighting game prototype, while our designer could mock something up in Gamemaker and put together a physical prototype. This week worked out well; however, we recognized that we could have been planning even better. Since these first two weeks have been greatly centered around exploration and discovery, we have left our planning loose and vague to more naturally uncover what it is we want to work on. Now that we have 3 solid directions we can better break down individual tasks. To help with this, I put together a simple spreadsheet to act as our preliminary sprint planning doc where we can see all the tasks in one place and what our estimated velocity for the week might be. I even figured out how to have the “Total Estimated Time Committed To” column look for the name the task is assigned to then add the estimated hours to the pool, so that we don’t have to calculate and input that ourselves. Below is an example of how the Google Sheet will be used:

We haven’t used this spreadsheet yet, but hopefully going into this next week it will help center the team and make sure everyone knows how much everyone else is committing to. While the Redmine adapted tools Champlain College provides for us does essentially hold all this same information, Redmine is inherently not as collaborative as Google Sheets; with this method, everyone can be inputting their tasks and velocity in one place. We still plan to use Redmine as that is what we are required to use for our capstone class. Yes, it adds a bit more time copying the information over from the spreadsheet to Redmine, but if anything I think it will help the team better stay on top of their tasks and logging their hours.

As far as team dynamic goes, I’d say the morale activities were very successful. The communication for our meeting this past Thursday was the best we’ve had this semester. We were able to talk about many sensitive topics that a few of us disagreed on while still keeping an objective mindset. At the end of the meeting everyone was happy, smiling, and wanting to spend time outside the project socializing and relaxing. Additionally, we came up with the idea to play the game(s) that we are working on each week so that we are all always in tuned with what we are making. We haven’t decided on a team name yet, but it really feels like we are all in this together and we all want to make something awesome.