Previous Post:
This week went really well! Looking at communication, I believe the team is at an all time high! We’ve been clearly communicating and making sure we all know what everyone is doing, and I’ve been doing my best to facilitate those conversations and meetings.
This week I wanted to get started on the tutorial. It’s an important part of the game, and will especially help in explaining our game at QA testing. I delegated the work to the other designers to make sure they met their hours, and that they were entertained. The narrative design team wrote a script for the tutorial, lead by the town mayor, a woman named Salem. The other system designer on the team worked on getting a tutorial system actually up and working. We were focused on getting designers in the build this week, so I made sure everyone was able to work on something they would have to interact with the repository for. The lead programmer on the team made a great Git workflow reference so that we could all keep the repo clean and organized with the new team members. After a week, I think it’s been working out well! In fact, with this new system, our bug testing and feedback pipeline is much cleaner. I spent a lot of time playtesting the game this week, so this improved pipeline was great for communication.
This week I personally was in a lot of meetings and decision making positions. We needed to decide how the tutorial was going to work in terms of the game, what, if anything, needed to be hardcoded, and generally how it fit with the rest of the game. On top of that, I had a discussion with the lead programmer about Adventurer Next Day Decisions, which is out term for what the adventurers decide to do once the next day button is pressed. We want to give the impression that these NPCs are actually living in the world, and to us this means making sure all the adventurers can buy equipment with their money, as well as spend it at places like the tavern. I documented the system, confirmed it with the programming team, and it’s going to be worked on next week.
Speaking of next week, we had a leads meeting that was very productive. Basically, we had all realized we were taking too many tasks and not finishing them completely. We were moving polish to the next sprint in lieu of making sure the system worked and immediate bug testing. Because of that, in order to make sure we were creating the best possible experience, we needed to cut some features. After some debate, the Quirk, Inventory, and Death systems were identified as the biggest risks that were not in already. We derisked them by moving some of the features to the backlog, and we ended up with something that satisfied the vision of the game while also keeping on schedule for Alpha and Beta requirements.
Next week we’re going to be taking a lot of the systems talked about in this meeting and making sure they’re implemented, testable, and in a position to be polished asap.
Next Post:
