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This week was really good for the team. Overall, we planned the work, worked the plan, and got everything we said we were going to get done. This week was special, since we’ve effectively entered alpha! For us, this means system lock. And I’m happy to say we’ve met it! All of the systems that we wanted to get in are in, in some fashion. There are only two systems that we have in which aren’t in a great spot: Monthly events and quirks.
Monthly events are month long quests that the player can work towards for short term goals. Currently, there is just one quest at the beginning of the game. We want to make those procedurally generated, to fit with the theme of the rest of the game. That new system was documented and planned out a while ago, but it needs to be relooked at to make sure it still fits. The quirks are another area we need to add more to. There are three quirks currently in the game, and there is a rough pipeline to make more. But it isn’t in the state to hand off to designers for rapid creation, so it needs a bit more love. We’re going to try and get those two in a good state asap.
Also, this next week is going to be very interesting. It’s spring break, and the week after that is (was) GDC. We have some team members that want to work over break, and then some members who will be going to San Francisco for GDC week even though the event was canceled. Because of this, we’ve run into a scenario where Scrum breaks down. So, we’re using a new system. Last year, when this game was still 5 people, we took the last two weeks and abandoned scrum in order to get more into the game. This meant we turned to a spreadsheet task board. Anything that needed to get done was put on a list, sorted by priority, and if you could do it, you did it. This is the same system that we’re using for the next two weeks, with some modification. While the first spreadsheet was created out of necessity, we’re making this spreadsheet to help with organization. This next sprint, which we’re making two weeks long instead of the normal one week, will focus on playtesting, bug fixing, and general UX/UI improvements. Basically, a hardening sprint, something I’ve wanted to do for a while.
After explaining this to the team, everyone understood, and we got to making tasks. For designers, it wasn’t too different than a normal sprint. We planned the normal content creation tasks that need to happen every week, and then we talked about updating documents, adding minor fixes to the build, and how to tackle large scale balancing. We created small tasks for all of that, and I think this next sprint will be a great success!
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