Angela Buchanan, Week 12 PPJ, Blog Post 8

Personal Postmortem

What went right?

-       Collaboration

The modular structure we’ve set up for our game has made it very open for a collaboration of ideas. I felt that it was great that we were able to use our initial individual concepts to test the process of making a game work as one consistent game, despite have such broad differences in the initial ideas.

We could have started with a fresh batch of game concepts, but I felt it was a beneficial experience for our team to take on the challenge of adapting games that were not initially designed for Alien Arcade. Since we were able to make it work effectively, I feel that it proves that our team is adept at collaborating with people whose ideas and goals are diverse.

I also like that we have built a space that is open to taking risk with little loss. Our game gives us the opportunity to try experimental ideas without worrying too much about failure, since losing a min-game is not as significant of a loss of losing an entire project.

-       Team Development

Initially, we had a lot of issues coming together as a development team. But over the duration of the course, we have all learned from our early mistakes and have made significant progress in creating a more efficient workforce.

While we still run into the occasional mistake or miscommunication error, they tend to be minor in comparison to our early issues. I am also confident that our team has the awareness needed to improve our work habits for a smoother run next quarter.

Not only have we improved functionally, but we have also grown together personally. We all take pride in the work we have accomplished together and have significant respect for each other.

-      Strong Aesthetic presence

On the art side of things, I’m personally proud of the theme we managed to develop for our game. Since the beginning everyone was involved in narrative elements of our game, and we were all interested in the setting we wanted to build.

I feel the idea of space carnies is a great way to develop a humorous, devious species and the idea of abductions and captives adds a nice touch of fear for the player.

Aside from ideas, we also have great assets that can easily be used across multiple games. We also have a lot of artwork that is effective at communicated our concepts and is great for promoting our idea publicly.

What went wrong?

-      Communication

                  This was especially problematic early on. I felt in the beginning it was easily to get lost in what was assigned and who it was assigned to. I didn’t just have problems with this amongst the artists, but it was also an issue that occurred with the programming side of things.

                  Despite this being a major issue, I felt we handled it well as a team. I felt a lot miscommunication stemmed from our lack of organization, which we realize now and plan to address in the future.

-      Changes in Ideas

In relation to the miscommunication, I felt our ideas were hard to confirm as decided upon officially. I felt this was especially prominent regarding themes for mini-games. I feel like this was primarily due to a lack of a well discussed asset list or Gantt chart.

I felt task priority was also hard to establish within the team. There were some tasks that were in higher needs of completion than others. There were also tasks that I felt were high priority, but after working on them and handing them off, I realized their priority wasn’t as significant as I once thought.

For example, the bodybuilder asset was viewed as a high priority when being made. But after his completion, I realized that the efforts put into him should have been applied to other assets first. However, he has gained a lot of popularity, so it was not a full loss.

-      Deadlines

I struggled with this personally. Unfortunately, the bulk of my class assignments this term were due early in the week and demanded a lot of attention. Combined with preparing for co-op, I had a chaotic, unpredictable schedule.

This combined with the miscommunication and organization issues early on in the project, led to a lot of assets being built the night before class. While it was relative easy to just roll the implementation of assets over to next week’s sprint, I would have preferred to have my assets completed earlier.

This was not only an issue of mine, but an issue experienced by other members of the team.

Moving forward and how do we fix these issues for future projects?

The majority of our team, including myself, agrees that a lack of organization was our biggest downfall. We thought perforce, meetings, and slack would be enough to manage an effective workflow for our project. Unfortunately, we were wrong.

In reality, we should have been making use of organization tools such as Trello. Even if it would not be our primary source of communication, it could serve as a guide for tasks assigned. There would also be no confusion as to what ideas were “official”, for tasks in Trello could be viewed as confirmed.

Despite the lack of organization, we still managed to pull ourselves together as a team and make great progress while acknowledging our mistakes and learning from them.

Lessons learned for future projects?:

-       Record everything major stated in meetings and keep it posted it in an easily assessable location.

-       Map out a detailed list of assets early on and actively communicate changes that are made to that list.

-       Always use organization tool, such as Trello, even if you think your current communication methods are fine.

-       Always ask others about the current state of things, especially if it directly involves your work.