Alongside a small group of people I am making the game Overridden as my capstone project. We have just completed the prototyping phase and are getting ready to move into the production phase next trimester. With the future in mind there is a lot we can learn from our prototyping phase.
No Real Team Leader:
What happened?
Our appointed project manager was not doing their project management duties. Team meetings which initially were weekly or twice a week declined until there were none and I had to call a meeting in order to pass around information. Nobody was keeping proper track of what people were working on, if they were working, or if what they were working on is the highest priority.
Why did this happen?
Our project manager lost interest in the role and was frustrated causing them to stop working as hard. From my point of view I believe they feel mistreated due to being called out on places they have screwed up and by people reacting to their poor decisions. This I believe has caused them to lose faith in themselves and thus being less interested in the project.
What can we do to prevent this from happening again?
The first and foremost thing to do is to not allow someone who does not want the project management role to be the project manager. Other things that can help the project manager immensely include:
- Always informing them of major tasks completed
- Always logging hours and tasks
- clear small tasks in hack n plan
- with time estimates
- Coming to team meetings with a clear idea of what you have done and either what to do next or what you need from other people
- basically know your station
Depleting Communication:
What happened?
As the trimester starting getting close to ending, communications started petering out as well. almost no communications happened towards the programmers except for the programmers talking to each other and our graphical designer giving us their completed work.
Why did this happen?
A major part of this is due to end of trimester crunching where people just get stuck into their work and stop communicating. Another part of it I believe comes from our project manager losing faith (see above), And everyone else losing faith in our project manager.
What can we do to prevent this from happening again?
End of trimester crunching is a very typical thing to have happen, as is middle of production stress, It is important to try and push through to work regular hours and keep up regular meetings as long as your meetings don’t push someone to overwork themselves.
Scrapping Instead of Fixing:
What happened?
Several times over the trimester work was scrapped instead of addressed and so the issues were not solved. Primarily our animation program changed several times because they had difficulty getting it to work with unity. We did not know they were having difficulty in that area until they had told us that they had scrapped the program and started looking at another one, and when we offered our assistance in getting the first one working they denied. later the other programmer got the animation program working perfectly in another project. Thus our animation issues could have been solved early on but they were not.
Why did this happen?
This happened sue to a lack of capability to accept criticism, our animator would not accept the fact that they failed, they had to assume that the program is busted and not that they used it wrong because that would mean that they failed. Us as programmers should have seen that their first solution could have worked and we should have implemented it and showed them how to use it instead of just trusting them to work it out.
What can we do to prevent this from happening again?
The important thing to learn is to ask for help, and to accept the help when it is offered. everybody fails and everybody inevitably needs help. In this situation the team can prevent it through reassuring the person that it is okay and helping them fix the problem by working at it step by step. Sometimes it is the right call to scrap something instead of working longer on it, But nobody is capable of making that call on their own, they should go to the project manager and see if it can be fixed first. (project manager should approach the team at a team meeting for assistance).
Many risks solved:
What happened?
The larger majority of our potential problems were properly addressed with good ideas tested and guaranteed to work for our project. Many discussions happened to help address programmer scope by shifting around how things worked so as to make whether they create the intended experience a designers job and making them work was a programmer job.
Why did this happen?
We knew that this project required every single piece to work flawlessly in order for it to be a good game. We took that knowledge and wanted to have every single potential pothole filled before the end of this trimester, thus we were able to put our focus into each one individually and move on after finding our solution. We did not get stuck up in perfecting a single potential flaw but finding our best solution and then moving on.
What can we do to repeat this success?
This is not so easily reproducible, the best way I can think of involves a lot of the processes we used as a class. Things such as the weeks of pitch and pitch/idea refinement, the helpful advice from peers and lecturers/professionals, and the redirection of scope based on a team composition. For example in a project with more programmers it may have been a better idea to create a fully procedurally generated world instead of room generated.
Some good Teamwork:
What happened?
Some of the team worked wonderfully together being able to easily and clearly give directions as well as put creative spins on their solutions to benefit the project as a whole. Our graphic designer adapted well to having to do many iterations on their work, one designer adapted well to working with newly created systems and the programmers did their best to generate creative and efficient solutions to potential problems.
Why did this happen?
Due to the heavy pitch process at the start of the trimester everyone in the team had a clear understanding of what the game would eventually be, and so we could use that picture to work alone. People were also not hesitant to ask for directions or for help. It was tough for some to get used to the structure but that was the intent of the trimester and by having some careful one on one discussions early on they were able to adapt (for the most part) and produce increasingly good results due to the reassurances given by their team members.
What can we do to repeat this success?
Several things went into this which together helped immensely:
- The whole team needs to have a picture of the game in their head
- be careful of having too drastically different ideas
- this can be helped by discussing the game from the core out so that everyone has the same sense of priorities
- This allows people to more easily work unprompted
- Team meetings where everyone has a say in everything, and everyone talks about what they are working on in detail thus allowing people to give suggestions and offer advice as well as reassurances and give recognition of a job well done
Anne Hibble 