Game Design 2 - The Sprint

Thoughts about our decision before the upcoming deadline.

Written the 9th of Mrch 2019 by Thomas Cairns.

Introduction

This is the final post of a five part long series regarding the development of game for a school project. For more details about the project please read the previous posts.

Previous posts:

• Game Design 2 - Projectiles // 2nd Mar
• Game Design 2 - Movement Patterns // 23rd Feb
• Game Design 2 - State Manager // 16th Feb
• Game Design 2 - Bounce Mechanic // 8th Feb

Task

With less than a week to go the project is approaching its end at a rapid pace. Since the last post I haven't worked with any specific part of the game or any specific system. Instead my work has been focused around fixing bugs and implementing minor changes that hopefully makes the game feel more complete. Unlike my previous posts, that have been about focused around technological implementations, this one will focus more on our development process.

Backlog

Let me start out with giving you some boring numbers.

Each line in the table above represents what status a task can have in our backlog. The number next to each status is the number of task that has the respected label attached. With the final deadline approaching rapidly and with a third of our tasks not completed yet we decided, just the other day, that we really need to focus.

Focus

One of the first goals we set for ourselves during this project, was to focus on a polished game rather than a feature heavy one, we really saw this as a top priority. However somewhere along the way we seems to have forgotten this very fundamental principle. So while in the process of re-evaluating what we actually want to work on during our last week of development we where all in agreement that we needed to make two changes. Firstly cut features that don't work and are superfluous. Secondly polish the features we find to be essential.

Prioritization

We had a work session where we first selected tasks from the backlog that where not completed and that we really wanted to keep. Then we appended tasks that we knew about and that where required to complete the game but hadn't actually added to the backlog, those task that are talked about and whispered but they never actually make it onto paper.

As mentioned previously we want to remove features that are not working well, so we added task that allow for time for that. Lastly we added bugs and other changes that will help polish.

Conclusion

What we have done now is what we should have been doing every week, groom our backlog and make sure that we are sticking to our original goal. It's a very small task and something that is super easy to see looking back at the progression of the project. However with the ever growing mountain of task that is the backlog and a constantly approaching deadline it's easy to forget on the big picture because focusing on something small is a lot more comfortable.

Another thing that I will try and change for the next iteration is to visualize the main goal that the team has set together for the project. Preferably I want to place it somewhere where I see it often, an example would be to create a background image for the desktop. Another example would be to place the goal on the sprint and/or backlog.