Summary
Week four is now upon us and things aren’t slowing down. Now that we’ve had our pitches with clients, we can move forward with our game idea and begin initial production.
When our client visited, and after we had decided on an idea, they sat down with us and started brainstorming the different steps we would need to take to get something working to the end of the semester. Since we are planning on meeting several Amazon folks at GDC, we asked what the most important pieces of the puzzle were so we could have something to show when we get there. Our client suggested a few different pieces to start working on.
Since one of the core features of the game is Twitch-integration, he suggested that we explore that and be able to have an interface set up where we can do something on Twitch, and have it affect something within the game. Even something small such as having a character jump on command would be a good thing to be able to show. The artists on the other hand were told that having some character and environment art to show along with a model doing some animations done would be their goal. None of those are small tasks, which means that the team will be working rigorously over the next couple weeks.
For this week’s tasks, we’ve re-designed how we scrum and track tasks in effort to better serve our team’s needs. Since we had our first big pull-down after the client meeting last week, we were able to identify a few things that worked and that the team wanted to change. Being able to track tasks daily was found to be useful, but being able to break tasks down individually was something that the team wanted to do more clearly. That said, here’s a few of the tasks being taken on this week:
Artists
– Character 1 Concept Art (Finished)
– Questions for Tech Art Training (Finished)
– Quarter’s Presentation Art (Finished)
– Environment Art (In progress)
– Tech Art Meeting (in progress)
– Team Photo Editing (in progress)
– Environment Art Final (in progress)
– Branding Final (in progress)
Programmers
– Research Twitch Integration with Lumberyard (Finished)
– Skype Meeting with HCII person (Finished)
– Research Twitch/Lumberyard Pipeline (Finished)
– Develop New Tasks List (Finished)
– Environment Planning/Interaction Maps [With Designers] (Finished)
– Receive Message from Twitch (in progress)
– Connect Lumberyard with Twitch IRC (in progress)
– Receive Messages from Twitch Sawmill channel (in progress)
Design/Production
– Presentation Content (Finished)
– Presentation Content Edits (Finished)
– Team Photo Shoot (Finished)
– Board Reorganization (Finished)
– Replace Chair (Finished)
– Website Content Pulldown (Finished)
– Environment References (Finished)
– Fix Incorrect ETC Website Info (Finished)
– Blog draft finished (in progress)
– Blog Approval Final (in progress)
– Website week 5 posted (in progress)
– Contact HCII researcher (in progress)
– Contact HCII designer (Finished)
That about wraps is up for this week. It’s been a busy week and we’ll have another busy one coming up! Until then, have a great week.