Zak Olyarnik | Week 4: Crossed Signals

WEEKLY NARRATIVE

We were off to a rocky start when the design team threw a bunch of new powers they wanted at the coders, but didn't really provide the kind of detail needed to implement them.  Corwin came in with a huge list of questions to help us do our jobs, and I think he scared them off.  So we did our best with what we had, only to come in to the Friday meeting and be told that stuff wasn't quite what was wanted.  Well, it came out that the designers weren't even on the same page as each other, so how were we expected to figure out...?  But I digress.  Most of the changes at that point were easy enough.

How do I log all the hours spent having discussions over chat, when nothing was really produced from them, at least not on my end?  My job is to make sure other people do their jobs, and until now I didn't realize what a responsibility that was whenever my senior design team lead tried to pull that excuse.  I want to do more, but I just don't have the time.  My biggest contributions to Rem are what gets done during my Sunday all-nighters, making sure everything is ready to be turned in.

This week, I did go for a few easy kills in the code.  I removed some unneeded stuff from PlayerController, and hooked up the abilities to buttons because I've become the resident Rewired guy.  That also involved checking to see if the separate power scripts were attached to the player prefab before trying to activate them, which was a cool design trick Corwin came up with.  That guy needs a medal, with all the late hours he's been putting in.

CONTENT WITH HOURS

• Meetings (2 hours)
• Retooling playtest survey again (1 hour)
• Removing old camera references in PlayerController (1 hour)
• Adding ability hooks in PlayerController (1 hour)
• Scrum presentation (2 hours)

WORKFLOW EXAMPLES

POSITIVE OUTCOMES

• I'm growing to feel that I can really depend on my teammates to get stuff done.  Some are still playing a little loose with deadlines, but we have enough people to pick up the slack on the team assignments.

NEGATIVE OUTCOMES

• Each department has their own workflow which works pretty well, but I don't think any of us considered the hand-off until now. 
• Want to do more, but don't want to be overwhelmed like last quarter

NEXT TASKS

Personally, I'll be keeping the GDD, sell, playtest survey, and other documents up to date.  Programmers should be set to move on to the second enemy, and then after that, stretch goals and whatever else we can do for more "juice".

TOTAL HOURS LOGGED THIS WEEK: 7 hours