Conner Root

Time for full production!

OUT OF GREENLIGHT

We were able to leave Greenlight about a week earlier than planned and transition into full production, which is fantastic. So far, the team has been maintaining a pretty consistent velocity with many still not even hitting their 12.5 hours. It is slightly unfortunate, as many of our team members want more to do, but with where we are there just is not that much work to do on their respective parts of the game.

Storyend is in a strange position, where overall we are slightly ahead of schedule leaving some sub teams with minimal work making some of us think we could become slightly more ambitious. The problem is that with other sub teams being slightly behind we know we cannot risk any new features that would put more work on those sub teams.

INTO FULL PRODUCTION

I always liked the Eisenhower quote (apparently not actually his but that's fine): "plans are worthless but planning is everything;" however, I don't think I never really understood it until after dozens on dozens of lead planning meetings: there is still more for us to plan. As plans change or fall through, it seems we constantly need to re-plan something or plan for something else.

Recently, we have been establishing the full list of every feature and assessing their current level of quality, and setting targets for our alpha, beta and release milestones. This is so we can properly determine their respective priorities over the next few sprints. This has been how we have been determining how far ahead/behind certain teams are (based on the number of features that are at/below/past the target level of quality for the next milestone).

TRYING TO STAY ON TRACK

As I have alluded to, our three sub teams (UI, Combat/AI, and Level) are all at different places. So far, the combat team seems to be the only one that is fairly on track, which I think is because that team is fairly stacked when it comes to technical proficiency. 5 of the 6 of us (the QA lead, Jason, being the 6th) can program, meaning technical impediments do not really slow us down that much.

For the UI team, we are slightly behind because we just have not really fleshed out the designs yet so there is not much work going on in that team. With level, I've been thinking recently that they are falling behind slightly because of how broad their responsibilities are compared to their team. The only have one programmer, one designer who consistently works in build and an artist who places assets.

To help sub teams, we are starting to think about bringing on freelancers and moving our current people around. For example, next sprint we intend on moving our AI programmer (all AI features are at the desired level for our alpha milestone) to the level team to assist with developing the obstructions for the levels. For now, the plan is to have him stay there for one sprint, afterwards the leads will reevaluate the situation to determine if there needs to be a more permanent change.