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.
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