Postmortem

Being the project manager for my first real game in a group of 6 people has been a learning experience for all of us. Keeping the group together and working with each other has been my task. We have had good times where we had successes with the game as well as more troubling ones where we have had a little conflict within the group.

The game as a whole came together very good in the end despite that one of our programmers ended up leaving 2 weeks before the game was done leaving all the programming to the less experienced programmer in the group. This did of course cause some problems as that programmer did not understand the code that the more experienced programmer was using. So inevitably some changes had to be done last minute to adjust it so our then current programmer would be able to finish the work and complete the game.

I decided to put together a group contract for our group so we had something to fall back on in case something didn’t go well. Our group combination in itself was not very bad. We all did get along good enough to be in a professional work team, even though socially we did not all fit together quite as well. This of course did not really matter since we needed to be professional when working together and try to not get into fights.
Unfortunately some little complications did arise but never ended up being bad enough to halt the work progress enough to miss a deadline.
We did however have some problems with one of the members continuously showing up late to the meetings and that became quite an annoyance. Fortunately this did not end up slowing down the game progress since most of the work that needed to be done was for the programmers.

One major obstacle though was when our graphic student lost almost all his art work because the files got corrupted somehow and so destroyed the files. This added a lot of extra work to our artist who had to basically redo all the art work that was not already added to the game. One very valuable lesson was learned here though, which was that it was very important to always back up the files on some cloud storage or somewhere where they could be easily saved and used again in case something crashes.

We have of course had some delays within the group not only from the files being corrupted but also from people being sick and people being away for several days.
Of course this kind of stuff does happen, but as long as it does not affect the deadlines for the project then it is not a huge hurdle to overcome. When it comes down to it, real life will affect any project and create delays in certain ways which need to be taken care of as well as possible. This is one thing that I have learned and will now be able to prepare better for future project in a more agile way like we have learned in my project management class.

Overall this project has helped me achieve my goal of becoming a good leader for the groups that I will be leading in the future, while preparing for inevitable hurdles that come along the way. I hope my group learned as much from this project as I did and will be able to develop and grow to continuously become a better self.

About Alexander Ebbesson

2017 Project Management

View all posts by Alexander Ebbesson →