Review on Production & Performance (Day 7)

*Weekly Readings: Chapters 3 & 4 Agile Game Development with Scrum

Through most of chapter 3, the subject had covered mostly the team roles and their responsibilities working on a project with SCRUM. The chapter had provided a good historic background to how the method was developed and how the different principles were created to improve the methodology. It also covers a lot of good lesson points of development such as project management, sprint goals, and the terminology used throughout SCRUM production.

Chapter 4 of the reading covers the Sprints portion of SCRUM and all of its organizational concepts such as burndown charts, reviews, and holding team meetings. The whole chapter lays out each parts of the sprint planning, different types of production meetings, and their retrospectives. From what I could find interesting from this part of the chapter, it’s that a part of the retrospective changes covers through different scenarios that would impend the progress on sprint production such as identifying their goals and reassessing their current plans to adapt to new changes.

*Weekly Production Review

For my 1st and 2nd week of game production course, I was assigned to be part of a game development project as a temporary Producer. As for the team that I was assigned, they’re all up and coming game developers that are taking classes at the University of Advancing Technology (UAT) in Tempe, Arizona. I had contacted the team leader via email and informed them of who I was and my reason for participating in their team. The Lead developer was a busy person, so he left a quick response and a few links regarding all the details of their working game project and the documentations that he left on a Google Drive. Later, I was given access to their Axosoft and Bitbucket links to their current project and looked though their previous sprints.

I spent a good amount of time looking through all the previous GGD, the PowerPoints, and all their WIP art assets. So far, I was impressed with everything they managed to do in one semester, especially since they have a small team working on the game. As a temp Producer, my concerns are that I still haven’t come face to face with the team themselves since these past two weeks had me away from town for a while. Most of our contact has been through the Discord chats, but it doesn’t help me with getting to know their personalities. While I do want to help out their production as much as I could, I want to meet each one of them and get to know the team more, so I can find the reason behind their motivation and figure out what drives a small team to completing such a large task that would take at least a year to accomplish.

Most of the working as a game comes down to learning something new. While I’ve had a rough start with getting to know the team and quickly catching up to speed with their progress, I’ve been able to brace myself for such adaptations. As much as I have to go through this “development hell”, I’m doing my best within my position to fully documenting the teams progress and checking for additional resources that will help the team for future game development.