Journeyman Week 3

At the start of this week, I had a number of important questions on my mind:

• Are we communicating and working efficiently?

• How is our project diffenerent than the source material?

• Are we on track as a team?

The answer to these questions were all negative and therefore I resolved to dedicate my week to fixing these core issues.

Solving Inefficiencies in our workflow

restructing our chain of communication. Generally, our lead would have the entire team take part in meetings 4 times a week, in which we would discuss super-specific tasks (like narrative) in which the art and programming team would stay muted and not speak. The sheer frequency of meetings also means that no notable progress can really be made in the time between each of them.

My proposed solution to this was the following schedule:

• Tuesday: SCRUM meeting with entire team before the technical session.

• Friday: Morning seminar session with our supervisor, and then a lead-only meeting later that day.

The Tuesday SCRUM meeting ensured that each and every member could discuss where they were up to, and mention anything they were struggling with. Having all members present allows everyone to give input and offer to help people with what they were stuck on. It also allowed a person of another discipline to see the progress of a task that may currently be blocking them. Doing this before the technical session will enable us to present any issues to supervisors for advice.

The Friday morning session allows for a short catch up to discuss any progress or worries. The events of the week can then be discussed between the leads at the lead-only session and any changes needed can be discussed to be thought about over the weekend. The time in-between should be for work and any meetings needed should only include the necessary parties.

Revitalising core House of the Dead Gameplay

One of my questions was how our current gameplay differed from what the original games did, and my answer was... well nothing at all. Every idea I had came up with had already been explored and added to the series at some point. As the sole gameplay designer it was also hard to try and "reinvent the wheel" for such an old and outdated genre. I researched how the rail shooter evolved into the modern shooter, and came up with ideas on how we could modernise House of the Dead by adding modern shooter components. I held a team meeting and a poll on whether we should move over to free movement which won out.

Subsequently, I amended by GDD with the changes affected by our decision (i.e player movement, ability systrem, ect.) and incldued research into modern games we could utilsie mechanics from, which were somewhat similar to House of the Dead.

Getting back on track

The simple answer to whether we were on track was no. Our team was now a quarter through the project and was had still not even touched the engine. I resolved to get us out of pre-production by the next week.

In our Friday morning session, we were missing all of the art team and the design team lead. As a result, I decided to talk to the team about what steps we would be taking next, and organising the team's tasks to ensure pre-production will be finished by Tuesday. In order to do this, I again held a SCRUM meeting to discuss all the team's

After this team meeting, I contacted the Art team and had a serious chat with them discussing how they need to be communicating better with the entire team, and to stop skipping out on our sessions. Being unable to contact Art on such crucial decisions (especially their lead) is simply unacceptable at this point in the project. Therefore we came to an agreement on acceptable working hours.

I then held the Lead meeting which only the Art Lead did not show up for. We discussed our thoughts on scope, whether we felt everything done so far was reasonable, and what steps we would be taking in the coming days. I instructed the Design Lead to create an excel document detailing the milestones and mid-milestones for each team so we could effectively plan ahead for when each task should be finished.

At the tail end of the week I submitted the necessary animations for players and enemies based on the current game mechanics we had.