Devlog 3 - Group Development & Scheduling

Hello again! It's been a little while. Lets talk about what we've been up to. 

Over the past few weeks, our group has made efforts to clarify both our team dynamics and game structure. Let's first talk about the former:

Team Dynamics - What's new?

It has been a long enough time that we can now confidently assess what is effective and ineffective about our workflow. To bring these aspects to light, we performed a quick interactive activity - the Sailboat Method:

Using these findings, we plan to adjust how we work to play more to our strengths and watch out for any pitfalls we outlined in the weeks ahead. We're happy to report that most of what we outlined as concerns, pitfalls, or anything holding us back,  is fixable or somewhat treatable.

Most of all, what threatens us most is still our individual schedules. We have basically no time where all 5 of our group members are available at the same time, so we are working on instead improving our #meeting-summaries channel in discord to fill in those who couldn't make it. It's not an ideal solution, but there exists no alternative as multiple members have unadjustable job schedules.

Speaking of Schedules, what does our project schedule look like?

This is an aspect to our project that we started last week, with the aim to set soft deadlines for game components (art, programming narrative, etc) for the second semester. What we want to bring to light most of all, however, is our "week 0 plan" which predates the start of semester 2:

This slot in our schedule dictates what we want to have done before semester 2 begins. This allows us to build the following weeks of the schedule under a safe assumption that these aspects to the project are complete. Next devlog may include the entire schedule in detail, so look out for that if you're interested in the full scale. 

Within this soft milestone of ours, the game is in a state where the basic loop (money earning), the catch (opening character packs), and a basic narrative premise are present in the game and ready for feedback. 

Creative Brief

An important aspect to this project, that we talked about in the first devlog, is the idea that this game should address a real-world issue and say something distinct about it. When we put together our creative brief, we got to talk more about our vision for this game and how it relates to the initial problem we chose: Wealth inequality and the selfishness that lied below. 

Proposal Presentation - Greenlit!

After laying out more groundwork for our GDD, Team Charter, and Creative Brief, we felt ready to begin work on the proposal presentation and formally pitch the idea to our classmates. Within our presentation, we went over our team & team structure,  game concept and relation to theme, target audience & competitors, and core game pillars. 

We're happy to say that our project got greenlit on the first try! We're excited to move forward with our current velocity, but that isn't to say we were without actionable feedback.

Mainly, we need to start formally tracking tasks in a software like Trello or Jira, as word of mouth won't cut it going into development of the game itself. We also got feedback  saying that our GDD and Team Charter need to be more detailed in areas such as risk mitigation and dealing with group conflict - and we agree. With our sailboat retrospective, risk mitigation should be easier - but we struggle with defining clearer methods of dealing with group conflict; Our group feels as if we'd have to first encounter conflict to be able to plan ways to deal with it in the future. 

Either way, we're doing our best over here. Please look forward to more developments, and perhaps a playable build by as early as January!?

What next?

ACUTAL GAME DEVELOPMENT!!!! THIS IS NOT A DRILL!!! We're really eager to get working on the game itself, and we think we're about ready for it. We just have to finalize some schedule-related aspects to the project, and then we will have conquered the mountain of documentation that this course entails. Next devlogs will likely include early progress screenshots (however simple they may be), so please look forward to that!

That's it for now!

We hope for your continued interest in our project. Until next time!