Week 3-4

Week 3

2 weeks until a prototype, that's the deadline I’ve given the team. It seems that Anna agreed with my earlier assessment on milestones and as such we’ve been tasked with setting up milestones for our team. In the grand scheme of things taking two weeks to churn out a prototype for the starting area seems about right. Once that has been completed, we’ll be able to start some playtests and get onto bug fixing whilst keeping development going on the remaining areas. To add some context, the game is a Metroid Vania with 3 main stages. Michael has produced an extensive design document that covers almost everything I could have asked for, and as such I have now been able to

put together an extensive list of tasks that’ll need to be completed.

The programmers are absolutely flying through the tasks I’ve been setting in the sprints.

Early concept art

I've delegated Harvey as the lead programmer as he seems to be the most communicative of the bunch and was the one to set up the GitHub. The only issue we’ve had on the programming side is that one of the programmers who was at the first meeting has dropped off the radar after I assigned him some pretty crucial tasks. It’s a bit of a shame considering I explicitly wanted to avoid this sort of thing, but the saving grace is that I worked with his brother during the last game jam, so I have a few ways of finding out what's going on with them. As for the other two no-shows, we’ve heard nothing from one and the other is a bit of a stranger case. They seem to be wanting to be doing art rather than tech, whilst this isn’t a big issue for the game jam as we can happily use another artist it does set off a few alarm bells. The fact that they haven’t gotten around to changing their course yet tells me that they might not be the most organised, which in turn is backed up by the fact that they haven’t shown up to any of the group meetings or the one-on-one meetings that Van has organised specifically so that we could talk to them about the project. Whilst I'm largely letting Van handle it I'll bring it up with Travis if we still don’t get to talk to them within the week.

The only other thing to talk about is the Thursday meetings. I'm leaning towards making them fortnightly but at the minute I might trial them as just an online thing for a week or two to see how that goes. At the minute whilst they are helpful to show everyone what the rest of the team has been working on the amount that people have to show actually isn’t a whole lot so it might be quite demoralising for those that haven’t done much in the first half of the week.

Week 4

Not much to talk about this week, the sprint goals were largely met. Although Michael had to step in, since Oakley went AWOL, to do the movement script, however he showed up to the meeting on Monday so that's Largely been remedied.

I’m taking a relatively relaxed approach to those that miss meetings without letting us know, at least to start with. Having come from a practical heavy course prior to coming to Portsmouth, I can understand that they might be feeling like they are too far behind to come to the meetings, which is a feeling I’d like to discourage as best I can.

Whilst it’s frustrating that it caused a slight time loss due to two people having worked on the same thing, I'm viewing it as the necessary attrition of a student group project.