Review on Production & Performance (Day 27)

Assignment 5.1: Weekly Journal

Weekly Readings: Chapters 10-13 of Agile Game Development with Scrum

Chapter 10: Agile Technology – This chapter has a lot of talk about the challenges encountered with creating technology for games and later describes a few helpful solutions to these issues. One of these issues is how Late Changes made in projects can result greater costs rather than what it was in its early stage. This issue is due to uncertainty within the production line among the 3 job classes. Some issues like Programmers may end up forgetting to document their scripts function and makes it harder for any newcomers to read and understand the script written by prior work, taking a much longer time out of the potential working hours. Later, the chapter goes into an Agile approach on how to fix these issues. One solution involves pairing programmers together on a work while another involves practices of test-driven development that will eventually create a high-grade and simple code that can be changed without too much effort and reduces the costs of production.

Chapter 11: Agile Art and Audio – This chapter is almost the same as the previous one from before, only now it has to do with game artists. Some of these problems involve the lack of conceptual understanding on what to build within the game and are often plagued by slow iterations due to the lack of equipment. An Agile approach to this is to help artists understand their own skills and abilities. One of the useful approaches I found helpful is building up the iteration knowledge of the game. This is to help their understanding what assets to make before the designers start building levels and avoiding any misconceptions on a stage. As mentioned in my previous journal post, Cross-discipline teams are good at iterating specific asset and are recommended for future productions that require budgeting plans on assets.

Chapter 12: Agile Design – Once again, this chapter covers a Designers viewpoint of what challenges they’re often faced during production. While the role of a designer varies to some tasks such as Story writing, creating audio, and level designing, they’re often implementing their own habits of documentation for what they identify within the game. The easiest, yet complicated solution to this practice is to have the designers collaborate and communicate face-to-face with their teams often.

Chapter 13: Agile QA and Production – At this point of the chapter, we should’ve already grasps the main concepts of why QA and production are highly important when dealing with agile production. QA is often done right before the Alpha build is made, but one of the best ways to ensure better QA documenting is constant feedback throughout the production. This also involve a strong communication among the cross-discipline teams. Finally, the chapter moves on to the Producer’s role within production. The producer is tasked with tracking external dependencies, publishing collaborations, outsourcing support, first-party support, risk management and critical chain managements. Producers are often seen as the person who makes sure everything gets done since they can assume roles such as ScrumMaster or Product Owner anytime during production.

*Weekly Production Review

As far as I’m concerned with how well they’re progressing their sprint quota before the end of next week, I’ve been more worried about their social media trend. While the team lead had told me to Research ways to reach more people and improve traffic to their team’s website and social media, I’m not inclined to using my own accounts for contributions. The reason behind my action is because I was looking into other effective measures into helping them increase their visitors that go to their website. While the team lead seemed displeased with how I effectively skipped part of his tasking, there isn’t much to share with my network since I alone don’t have any strong networking connections to help his team. I also have my own standard as to what I intend to share with groups, but if they really want to spread their company’s name further, they should start building more accounts for all the other sites that they don’t have like LinkedIn or Twitch.

Another part that had me concerned was the fact that their website wasn’t being updated weekly after production. The last time anyone had posted any progress was from 2 weeks ago and it was only for a build review. While suggesting these methods to the team lead, I’ve recently discovered that most of the teams had outright abandoned their accounts and don’t use their social accounts. While I would accept the fact that each team member has their reasons for not using their accounts to spread their game’s release, they should learn to effectively use these tools because it increases their networking to other people that have an interest in games.

Although I can’t assure myself that what I’ve been doing has been productive to their team. As the team lead had mentioned from before the time I got on his team, they’re a small, laxed group and putting pressure on them would only serve to disrupt their work. I’m not expecting any drastic changes to their production cycle, but there are some circumstances that can be solved through correct planning and documentation.

Even though there were some issues that I needed to address to their team, I had to assure myself on my next actions before diving into the next phase. During this past week, I’ve spoken with some of my other classmates that are also dealing with their groups problems. One of the producers had suggested to take a more relaxed approach and help their team lead with bettering their work. I’ve made several reflections on my actions these past few weeks and I’ll try to better myself as a producer in the longer runs.

Since joining a production team, I’ve steadily gained a good understanding on the team and learned about their companies’ goals and how they want to be perceived as. For the next week, I’m in charge of building a quick 2-5-minute video presentation that details my research into their production methodology. I will focus on helping out my team until the Final week is over.