Journeyman Week 5

Over the weekend I'd had some team members come to me with issues which I had to help them out with, such has how to use Trello,GitHub and use AI behaviour trees. Consequently, I did a one-on-one session to explain Trello to one of the other team members, and then made a YouTube tutorial/live demo of how to use GitHub Desktop on your computer.

After this, we had our weekly SCRUM where we discussed the tasks the team had done, and where the project was up to on a whole. Most things looked good, however I wanted to ensure we were moving faster when it came to programming. I realised the team were not all already working in the same UE4 project, which would create huge amounts of work for the Git Master later down the line. I organised with the lead programmer so that a playable demo of the game would be finished by the end of the week, and all programmers would be working inside of the main project on GitHub.

During the SCRUM, I moved around programming tasks to ensure we had something to show by the end of the week. I also offered to help with the speed of things by giving the programmers by already finished Zombie AI but they wanted to handle that themselves. I had to try chase up the Art Lead again as he had missed another SCRUM session, which made it harder to get the green light for any changes on their team.

At the technical session, I discussed with the programmers, and also some lecturers ways in which we could implement the dismemberment system. I gave the programmers a few resources I found on how to add them into the game, and from there we communciated with the character art team on making removable seams inside of the character mesh.

I was happy at the end of the week because we finally got to see a short demo of the game from the programmers, which we could then build and continue from. The game levels were also coming along really well. In order to prepare for the next sprints, I discussed with my Co-Lead whether they had finished the milestone document that was due a few weeks back, but still no progress had been made from the last time I saw it. I was again feeling frustrated at tasks delegated not being done properly but still not having the time to be able to take them on myself due to having to do all of the gameplay design.

I ended this week feeling sad and frustrated as I'd been finding it hard to delegate tasks and trust my other team members to do stuff alone. I began getting very overwhelmed by the amount of work I had, and how much everyone would ask me for things, rather than doing independent research, looking at the GDD, or turning to the other leads. A lot of the time I'd be repeating myself again and again which just got me more frustrated.

I even had a team member be angry with me for not telling them personally when the meeting was, when two weeks ago I'd already created a meeting agenda which hasn't been altered. To make sure tasks were done, I had to chase people, and even do some of the work for them to ensure it was done. Even simple things like adding work to the GDD had not been done. Therefore, I sat down with the other leads at the end of the week and expressed my feelings, and told them to make executive decisions themselves without having to consult me on them, just discuss these decisions at the Lead meeting.