WEEKLY NARRATIVE
The weekly meetings are always really enlightening, because usually the different departments tend to work pretty autonomously. We're all together after class on Monday to make the plans for the week, but then we all go our separate ways and only communicate after that if we have questions or other issues. Or memes, always the memes. But then Friday is when we all regroup, hopefully with good news and nice, long lists of everything that's been accomplished, accompanied by much shorter, nonthreatening lists of what's left for the sprint. What we've been seeing lately, however, is that this independence has done more harm than good. Design...design comes up with a lot of totally interesting new ideas, but they're not very good at getting them out to the rest of the team. This includes things on the scale of both not letting modelers know that they've been tasked with creating the new levels, and not clearing new features with programmers to find out if they're even possible to implement. This week, the full team was shown a level schematic for the first time of a level which had already been finished being modeled and was "in-game", but required new programming features that were never even discussed. That's a huge workflow issue. It's one thing to need to ask for clarification on something, or even to find outright discrepancies in design that need addressed, but we can't be expecting programmers to implement things they were never told existed.In terms of tasks, I continue to be the "last line of defense" when it comes to submissions, including everything from GDD revisions to submitted playtest data, and of course compiling everyone else's PPJs into the scrum presentation. I took this one step further this week by doing some code reviews and verifying bug fixes. Mostly Corwin's as he posed the question earlier of "Who reviews the reviewer?" That'd be me.
CONTENT WITH HOURS
- Meetings (2 hours)
- Code review (1.5 hours)
- Reviewing the GDD, Gantt chart, and playtest data (2 hours)
- Scrum presentation (2 hours)
WORKFLOW EXAMPLES
Nothing exciting this week.POSITIVE OUTCOMES
- We've got a really tenacious programming team, who so far have been able to handle the mid-week design pivots gracefully.
- Most-to-all team goals are still being met, and with members putting in much more reasonable numbers of work-hours than were necessary for the same result last quarter.
NEGATIVE OUTCOMES
- Design is still coming up with ideas and not running them by programming. This causes two problems: first, the question of whether or not what they want is even possible, and second, the idea that they expect us to magically know about their changes without being told, then they get disappointed or upset when we don't.
- The team needs a better workflow, or maybe just to follow the one we have.
- There was a lot of finger-pointing at this week's meeting (yes, including some by me), and that's not a positive way to work.
- Getting people to get playtesters is like pulling teeth.
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