Blog post 1 – 20180208 – Using stories to guide the design process
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The subject for this post: The process of breaking down a user story about a whale. The aim of this process was to create tasks for the team members to work on during sprint 3. So – what did I do this week? As the lead designer, I led the design discussion in the sprint 3 planning meeting, Monday 20180205, with this user story working as a starting point: ………………………………………………………………………………………………………………………. As the whale I want to
Because I want to tell the player who I am and that I will come back …………………………………………………………………………………………………………………………. How did I do this? Together with the team, I broke every part of the user story down into tasks. Every part of the behaviors of the whale was discussed so all team members knew how it was supposed to work in the game, and what was needed to be done to get there. When all the tasks were defined, the ScrumMaster took over and led the team in accepting and time and risk estimating the tasks. For example: the first part of the user story is about how the whale appears in the game for the first time. The player is supposed to learn that the whale is large and dangerous and that the whale has an important role in the game. Here I first told the team my vision of when the whale appears – that it should be a slow, majestic movement of some sort, and that I wanted the whale to leave the screen in a similar way at a given point. Together we identified tasks for art, like concept art and animations for the whale. For the coders, we also identified tasks, for example for the movement. In the same way, I broke down the rest of the user story together with the team. The important “why”: The user story was created the way it was to match the aesthetic goal for the game: “The player should get the feeling of being a champion as if accomplishing a very difficult task on an elite level”. The gameplay must build up a knowledge about the whale to be something interesting, something the player will have to meet several times in the game and create an expectation that it will be both a fun and a hard experience for the player. As we are working in an agile scrum framework, our product backlog consists of our user stories. In my role, I prepare one or more user stories for each sprint planning meeting, trying to make them sized for one week´s work for the team. To gain the best possible outcome of the meeting, it felt both natural and necessary to try to build a good atmosphere in the room, so all team members felt that they were an important part of the design process and in creating the tasks for the work of this week.  |