Week one
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My group called Archon and I are working on a game called Aetherial (concept created by team Vampire). The game is a “shoot em up” where you as the player has to hunt down a giant flying evil whale on an alien planet (essentially Moby Dick in the sky).
As my Groups Design designer I am in charge of User Stories. “User Stories are short descriptions of a game, tool, or pipeline feature that has a clear value to a user. If the feature is a tool or pipeline change, the user can be a developer who uses the tool or pipeline to make the game.” (Keith, 2010, p 85) The user stories are intended to be used to communicate to the whole team what or how something needs to be created in our game while also trying to motivate why this something is valuable. In our case team Vampire’s designer had already created user stories for their concept, my job would be to divide those stories up into weeks depending on how important they would be to include in our game. However, the user stories we were given, while not bad per se, did not exactly fall in line well with how my group wanted to use user stories. It more or less felt like we had two sets of product backlogs instead of actual user stories. So I decided to write new user stories for each week and base them mostly on the requirements for each milestone (alpha, beta, etc) during the coming weeks.
Each week we focus on working with about five user stories as a sprint goal while not having them replace the product backlog. The goal is to highlight the most important things our game needs for each milestone, serving as a form of priority list and also give a motivation to why they are important. In the end though it seems that the stories mostly just end up being used to clarify any confusion that could be had between the different disciplines within my group when it comes to merging together assets. Perhaps not an optimal use for the stories as I wanted to break them down together with my group to find more detailed potential features. The main issue i face going forward is convincing my group that user stories can actually be more useful than they appear.  |
