My role in this project has been to producer/project Manager
Responsible for:
- Supervise the development of the game Unthrone
- Ensure that development times are met
- Monitor communication between departments and scrums
- Procure integrity of the group & scrums
- Organize presentations
- Organize and procure a quality guarantee of the game
- Organize testing sessions
- Social media management
Production
The development and conceptualization of UnThrone has began on February 5, 2018, at 2:05 p.m when or teachers proposed us the games of the pillars of the game that we were going to develop in the following 4 months.
The game pillars are:
- Accessible Dungeon Crawl Gameplay
- Game of Thrones TV series feel
- Three replayable levels with stretch goals
This image represents the final calendar of all the development. I must emphasize that initially there were only two vertical slices and that after the result of vertical 2 we were forced to perform a Vertical Slice 3, so that the production time in an alpha was reduced.
You can click on the calendar to see it better ->
Groups and Objectives Assignment
After starting the pre-production with the concept discovery, the team was divided into 3 departments, where each team took a role.
For the first two weeks (encompassing The Concept Discovery and a week of the first vertical slice) the work workflow was given by the research, development of the engine and game design, so that a group distribution by departments was maintained.
For the following weeks of development until the beta, we apply the Agile-Scrum methodology. In this way we formed several scrum groups where each of them took a goal to fulfill.
After the presentations of each one of the milestones, our professors, acting as publishers, requested us the necessary content for the next milestone. Then the Leads and I met to subdivide the required content into objectives and in this way form the scrum groups, resulting in:
(These images are taken from the scrum groups of VS1, VS3 and Alpha 2, you can click on the images to see each and every one of the releases)
Task Assignment
Once the scrum groups are assigned, a person is selected as a scrum master. (as a requirement, all members of the njoy games team must be at least once a scrum master)
Due to the lack of communication in several versions,we made a scrum of scrums, as can be seen in the images in the previous section.
The procedure followed by the scrum masters and team members was as follows:
- Fill in the table of available times (This allows knowing the amount of tasks that each of them could carry yeesout)
- Subdivide the objectives proposed by the leads and produce tasks as small as possible
- Each of the tasks is assigned an estimated time of completion among the entire group.
- Each member of the group, taking into account the table of available time and their specialization chooses the tasks that can be done.
- Then these tasks are reflected in the hacknplan application,
In the first vertical slice we use the trello application, although after knowing the existence of hacknplan, with more utilities, we change to hacknplan.
After assigning the tasks as we can see in the image on the right we calculate the commitment of each of the members, so that we can see the amount of work each one has, in this way an imbalance can be observed with the level of task sharing, so it is quick to act and balance it.
In the following tables you can see the evolution of the tables of times in order that for everyone is much more visual and more fun to fill, being the last table as it is right now.
After several versions, we realized that the assignment of objectives without a fixed date can lead to quite important bottlenecks, so finally, after the assignment of objectives and tasks, different objectives were assigned in individual internal milestones for each of the scrums
Workflow
After assigning tasks, the content production begins. The scrum masters supervise that team members work together with the producer.
After completing any task, the task is passed to the check-in column so that each leader of each department reviews that task and verifies that the result is as expected.
In the beginning and in order to achieve a follow-up with a better visualization of the state of development at all times, not only for the project management but also for all the co-workers, I made a gannt chart , in which each one At the time of finishing, or stop working on a task, he had to change the status of his task in the char itself.
The opinion of practically the majority of my colleagues was that they were basically doing the same thing as with the hacknplan so they chose to leave this idea aside. Perhaps with a more professional application of project management it would have been much more appropriate.
Twice a week we had a project class, so we took advantage of the opportunity to perform stand-ups of all the scrums, in order to encourage greater communication between the scrums themselves, as well as to inform the leads of the situation in which they were.
The process of the standup was to show on the screen the board of the management application that we used to see in what state all the tasks were, as I said before, firstly we used the trello application, and after two versions we passed to hacknplan, which we have used until the end of the development.
Although everyone tried a fluid communication with the whole world, being a large number of people, and that little by little the complexity of development was greater, develop a google sheet with which allowed to know at all times who was playing each of the scenes, so as not to overlap any work.
Finishing the job
At the time of finishing each one of the milestones, after the fulfillment of the freeze, theoretically an organized session of playtesting is carried out, to facilitate the finding of bugs and solve them. I say theoretically because we have only managed to accomplish this in one of the milestones. Mainly the problem is the lack of time to fix things and crucial requirements for deliveries.
The following image shows the assignment of groups and schedules of a weekend with Playtesting
To finish I wanted to also highlight that in the last two versions the work method has become again by departments. And instead of using the hacknplan as a tool we have looked for something much more visual and quick since the work is much more individual.
In the first image you can see the first iteration of an idea to make a list of tasks ordered by priority to solve bugs, in this way theoretically increase the speed of use
After several of my colleagues told me about it, and after using the github issues, people opted for the use of github issues, and therefore, the cost in time of trying to use the Google sheet on the list far exceeded hiring the system of github issues. So we went directly to github issues. A familiar app for everyone.
Other Work
Help in the assembly of the first iteration of the first map
Make some fire and blood particles
