Slashy Towers was an interesting project, The original pitch was to make an endless runner, but my designers pivoted to this which ended up being a hack n slash through endless combat arenas. The brief was to make a game for mobile that could be released commercially, but It had to keep programming scope to an absolute minimum due to the fact that the programmers (myself) were only supposed to work on it for 3 hours total each week. The game ended up being cancelled due to it not being at a soft launch-able state at the designated soft launch time. It failed for several reasons including: poor communication, misaligned scope, poor work ethic.
Poor Communication:
What happened?
Throughout the trimester communications between the designers and I was especially scarce. At the start several things were said which made me realise that what they visualised in their head was not at all what i was visualising and when I asked questions and posed some solutions to problems I saw they either never got back to me or said that the idea was good but they never acted on any of them. Whenever I asked for something from them they said they would do it, but would not keep me updated I had to ask repeatedly what was taking so long which left me in a position where I had tasks that were dependant on the designers and they were not working to free those tasks so I worked around them.
Why did this happen?
I believe that the primary reason this was so poor is because the designers didn’t have any passion for this project. The project had been pivoted so drastically so often and at the very beginning so that I believe they no longer really cared about it or had a drive to work hard on it. Another thing which impacted this heavily is my team members ability to do work, one had no home computer for most of the trimester and then after getting it they were not back in the swing of working hard. The other does their uni work late at night meaning that it is poorer quality and takes a lot longer for him than what he is capable of.
What can we do to prevent this from happening again?
The easiest way to fix the issues with communication in this way is to have a project manager who is doing their job. What I mean by that is:
- Someone who organises and runs regular meetings
- All current progress is discussed
- Where the project is behind is discussed and solutions discovered
- What is next that needs to be done
- Someone who gets information on what everyone is working on and facilitates the information someone needs getting to them
- Someone who tracks tasks and task dependencies deciding the priorities based on what is best for the project
Misaligned Scope:
What happened?
The plan for the project was well beyond what could have been done in the hours we were supposed to do on the project. The intended hours for the project were 18 hours (6 in class 12 outside class) per week for designers, and 3 hours (1 in class, 2 outside class) per week for the programmers (me). but the project scope had far far more programming work than could fit in that amount of time, it had a design scope that was tight but doable if the designers worked that much on it, which they did not.
Why did this happen?
I think this happened due to the designers not having a clear idea how much work has to go into some of the things they wanted. This isn’t helped by a bad habit of mine where I call a lot of thing ‘Easy’ when they are easy but time consuming. It also isn’t helped by designers ignoring people when they say that the scope is “out of whack”.
What can we do to prevent this from happening again?
The best way that i can think of to prevent this in the future is to create a document at the very start of the project where every piece of the project is dissected and given time estimates. Then the estimates are added, given a bit extra as a buffer to allow people to have bad weeks and compared against the total number of hours each person has to do. This should allow for easy tracking of when people are under performing and to see if the scope is too large to the team.
Poor Work Ethic:
What happened?
The teams work ethic waxed and waned meaning that some weeks a lot of work got done and other weeks none at all. There was a regular theme of low quality work from some members, a lot of last minute work and a lot of pushing commits that broke things.
Why did this happen?
This happened in major part due to this project being the less impact full out of the three that were being worked on simultaneously. which meant that unless a deadline was approaching for this project it was put at the bottom of the barrel, ignored.
What can we do to prevent this from happening again?
This can partially be fixed through the same solution I posed above for poor communication but with an added part of allocating time around multiple projects. but specifically for this it can help to give people the work that they want to do. Under a lot of circumstances that isn’t possible and people need to be willing to diligently work through the less interesting work for the benefit of the project.
Anne Hibble 