Zak Olyarnik | Week 3: Who You Gonna Call?

WEEKLY NARRATIVE

I decided to give the playtest survey another go, especially since we needed to actually get a first round of testers this week.  I took a lot of the feedback from Professor Rowe and committed myself to getting Qualtrics to work for us.  The default report is still doing some goofy formatting stuff, but reading and analyzing the results online works just fine for me.

We were told on rather short notice that we could compete for a chance to take Remembrance to GDC, and I was brought onboard to go through last quarter's sell presentation to tighten it and further work my presentation magic.  So I sat with Mike for a bit and we had a discussion about what the unique selling points of the game are, and how we could structure the presentation to keep coming back to them.  In the end, we weren't chosen to go, but I think the very act of going through the sell presentation has helped both from a design standpoint and for future deliverables.

And lastly, the first GDD revision was due, and because I'm very...particular...about documents, I wanted to go through and take the last editing and proofreading pass of it.  We ended up with a lot of good content, but boy, the organization, inconsistencies, and just general poor grammar really made me cringe.  Most of that was just a symptom of many people going in over the course of many months to make edits, but hopefully now it's all a little easier to read and reference. 

CONTENT WITH HOURS

• Full team meeting (2 hours)
• Retooling playtest survey again (1 hour)
• GDC presentation (1 hour)
• GDD updates and proofreading (7 hours)
• Scrum presentation (2 hours)

WORKFLOW EXAMPLES

Nothing special this week; I was doing mostly project management.

POSITIVE OUTCOMES

• Everything was a little easier this week.  Programmers were just fixing bugs so there were no real fires to put out, and the team deliverables were pretty non-threatening this time around too.

NEGATIVE OUTCOMES

• I don't think that moving to Perforce was a smart...move.  'Industry standard' and all that, but it feels like we wasted another whole week just getting it up and everyone onto it.
• No one tackled the "Experimental Features" Trello card, so there wasn't much else for programming to do this week, as we wait for the design specs of the new levels, enemies, and player abilities.

NEXT TASKS

Now that the GDD is updated, we can look at all of the planned new features at once and start assigning things to coders long-term.

TOTAL HOURS LOGGED THIS WEEK: 13 hours