Blog post 6 – Postmortem
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We in the group Archon have been working on the game Aetherial for the past 10 weeks and it is part of our course in game design. In the course we have a gold presentation where you are supposed to show the game for the teachers and the other students. And before this presentation of the game we have been working together on this game for nine weeks and hade one alfa and beta presentation. The game that we made is a 2D shoot them up game where the player controls a ship whit the WASD keys and shoots whit the space bar. The player can also teleport to the mouse position to avoid damage by the enemies that are shooting at you. There were 3 levels where the lasted one was the boss battle. In the game Aetherial the player controls a flying ship and its purpose is to kill big beings that is controlling the skies. Using the canon and the target missile rockets to kill the enemies the purpose of the game is to get to the big whale boss and kill it before it can take over the skies. During this weeks we have been working together in the same room but for the most part we worked from home. We in the group used scrum and the backlog to keep track of what we were going to do each week and what the other people in the group were working on. But during the times where we didn’t work in the same room the communication became much worse. And it become harder to get in touch with each other and therefore if we needed feedback on something fast we hade to wait for the other people to respond before we could continue the thing we were working on. Also, sometimes the miscommunication lead to us working on the same things as the other person and that made us waste a lot of time. Because of us working from home and still have standup meeting at 12 o’clock some team members didn’t show up to the meetings where we were telling the other members what we were working on. And this lead to us not knowing what the other persons were doing for that day. We didn’t make good users stories in the beginning, so we had to come up whit things along the way and that made it harder to have coherent game. The good thing about our group was that we had we had two programmers and to artist in our group which was good because if one got sick the other one could take up the work. It made it possible for us to divide the work more even between us and we could help each other out more. Even though none in the group had worked with unity or have created a game before this course, we did end up whit a good game that was fun to play. Working in a group of 6 people for a few months have given us a lot of experience on how it is to work in a group while using scrum. Scrum is often used in real companies which we now have practiced on. The purpose of doing this game was because it was a part of the course. We were supposed to learn about how to make a game and how it is to work in a group. We also learned to use scrum and its parts of using scrum meetings and standup meetings. And during production of the game we have written a blog post each week so that the reader gets updated on how the production is going. If we in the group hade worked together in the same room throughout the project we could have removed some of the issues regarding miscommunication and we could have gotten feedback faster. We could have then spent more time on the game instead of waiting to get responses from the other team members. For the days were not everyone showed up for the standup meetings we could have had them on discord or slack. Or we could have moved the standup meeting to another time of the day were everyone could meet up at. For the user stories we could have spent more time together to work on the user stories and not only relay on one or two persons. And we should have discussed more together so no misunderstandings were possible. The project was fun to make and working whit the same people for a long time was a new experience. The game turned out ok even if it hade some bugs and flaws, it was fun game that a lot of people liked.
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