26 January – 1 February, 2015:

Week 3 was our last week of conceptualisation, and it helped that our two main goals were to create the first version of a vision document to share with Vasso Paliouras, and then use this document to help steer our brainstorming towards a few concepts to pitch to Vasso and her team during our weekly meeting with Lending Hearts on Friday.  Our Scrum Retrospective and Sprint Planning on Monday helped us encapsulate these goals as user stories.

On Tuesday, the team gathered and helped Ruchi iterate on and narrow down her vision document to the bare bones of what we wanted to accomplish in the project based on our conversations with Vasso.  We then sent this document to Vasso for her feedback and worked with her to clarify any confusion she might have had with the content.

We pooled our resources on Wednesday to come up with new ideas and iterate on old ones while keeping our goals from the vision document in mind.  Individually, we created slides on a specific idea (whether one from the team or one we came up with individually) to share with our teammates on Thursday.  Dave Culyba joined us for that meeting and gave us some pointers on how to effectively narrow our ideas down and format them to present them to the client on Friday.

Our brainstorming resulted in a collective decision to present four high level concepts to Vasso and board members Constantine and Mary Nell.  Out of “Space Station”, “Town”, “Beehive / Ant hill” and “Story Branches”, they were excited about the idea of the space setting and the creative possibilities of a community telling stories together.  We learned a lot that would help direct us in the weeks to come.

One of Ruchi’s tasks this week was to create a survey for the Lending Hearts community with input from the team and our client.  This was completed with Mary Nell’s help and sent to Vasso to be shared with the families by the end of the week.

Besides the survey, Hannah has taken charge of room decorations and began communicating with Janice Metz after presenting some ideas and a budget to the team.  Wei completed the Baymax 6 team logo in time for it to be placed on the opening slide of our presentation to the  client on Friday, and her art was received well.  Hilman and Sam have set up bug tracking and version control, and Cheryl-Jean set up the team website and project description for our ETC page, and created a rough sprint plan for the rest of the term.

We will move into the pre-production phase of the project plan next week, and begin planning for Quarter Walkarounds and presentations.  This will involve delving deeper into our idea with regards to deliverables, scope and design, getting feedback from survey responses, and by Friday, hopefully creating a rough prototype or design plan to share with our client.

Hope everyone has a great Superbowl weekend!

19 – 25 January, 2015:

In our second week, we planned to focus on research and brainstorming.  A few other important things happened, however: on Monday, we had a meeting to set up a RACI (Responsible, Accountable, Consulted, Informed) chart for the team, which was really useful because of our sometimes overlapping roles and interests.  The chart is now posted in our project room, and we’ll make updates as a more clearly defined project plan is laid out.

On Tuesday, we had our first Sprint Planning meeting and Scrum, processes we plan to practise and refine throughout the semester.  We also each brought our own research on a certain type of game to the table, listing out what we felt were the overall vision, the good things and the bad things.  This helped us with our preliminary brainstorming session that narrowed our ideas into two, and then three categories.

Dave Culyba encouraged us to narrow down the vision of the whole project and come up with a vision document to help steer us more next week.  Ruchi made a list of ideas for what could be the client’s main goals for the project, and we refined these as a team to six high level ideas we presented to Vasso Paliouras during our Skype meeting on Friday.  Vasso was very quick to pull out the two most important goals to her, “creativity” and “companionship”, and through our conversation with her we tried to gather more information to help create a vision document.

Friday was also important for Wei, who presented her initial concepts for the logo to John Dessler, Ruth Comley and Shirley Yee.  John said her design reminded him of “connect the dots” games, which was cool.

Another good outcome of this week was that Sam and Hilman have decided on the game engine and will be going with Unity this semester.

This weekend will be the 48 hour Global Game Jam for Sam, Wei and Cheryl-Jean, which is going to be tiring, probably, but a lot of fun too.

Next week, we would like to have the first pass at the vision document sent to Vasso by Tuesday evening, and survey questions by Thursday evening.  Ruchi will be working on putting together the vision document and survey questions with input from the rest of the team.  Hannah will put together a plan and budget for our project room decorations.  Sam and Hilman will set up bug tracking and version control.  Wei will complete the logo and promotional materials.  Cheryl-Jean will complete a rough sprint plan for the whole semester, and set up the project website.  As a team, we will continue to brainstorm with the vision document in mind and hope to have more concrete ideas to bring to Vasso during our weekly meeting on Friday 30 January.

It’s starting to snow in Pittsburgh, which (to this cold-loving producer, at least) is lovely.

 

12 – 18 January, 2015:

Two days after the West Coast Trip, the Lending Hearts team settled into room 2410 at the ETC.  The first week of the ETC project course was a hectic one, with much administrative work to do even though we have not started building a product yet nor do we know what we are going to build.

On Monday, we met and talked about our expectations, exchanged contact information, and decided on a team name.  Our final choice “Baymax 6” is inspired by the personal healthcare robot and friend of the main character in the movie Big Hero 6, which we had seen together as a class last semester.

During the week, we settled on a schedule for core hours and weekly meetings with our client and advisers.  We also set up a folder structure on Google Drive for our documents, and a group on Facebook for easy communication.  Our first meeting with our advisers John Dessler and Dave Culyba was on Wednesday.  They talked to us about the ETC project process and discussed our individual roles, and went over our questions and concerns.

Friday morning was the important first meeting with our client, Vasso Paliouras, the Founder and Executive Director of Lending Hearts.  She met with all of us (and Hilman on Skype from LA where he was interviewing) and talked in further detail about the Lending Hearts community and the experience we would be building this semester.

Sam, Wei and Cheryl-Jean attended the “Playtest to Explore” workshop on Friday afternoon with the composition box created by the team, and gained some good insight from our classmates about our initial thoughts and ideas on sticky notes and through asking questions and brainstorming.

The plan for next week is to continue brainstorming and begin Scrum.  We will discuss team roles again on Monday for Cheryl-Jean’s RACI assignment for Production and Leadership class.  By Friday 23 January, our next client meeting, we hope to have narrowed this down to a few ideas which we can present to her over the phone.  Programmers Hilman and Sam have started thinking about tech for the project and are communicating with Steve Audia about possibly using the Unreal Engine.  Wei will be working on branding and promotional materials for the initial review on Friday 23 January.  Finally, Cheryl-Jean will be adding to the website this week once the ETC project websites have been set up.

It has been a whirlwind first week and we are excited to get started.