What did you personally contribute to the project (remember, you can include things that you didn't feature in the final game)?

I was the Lead of the Design team so my main responsibilities were orgainisatino, managing team morale and producting the GDD. In many intances I was a failitaor for the creativity of the team, hand out tasks and hosting sessions to let the group work, but I was also responsible for consolidating their ideas and presenting them to the other team leads. I do think I could have been more efficent in this as “too many ideas” was a comment that was repeated in the group post-mortem. Because our group was quite large and after the ideation phase we didn’t have as much input into the game I did assign some members to help me with the GDD, speficially Charlie who contrubuted diagrams and the summary section, Taylor who also contributed a game flow diagram and the UI section and Alex C who expanded on the future levels section.

What was the most enjoyable thing about the project? What was the least enjoyable?

The most enjoyable aspect of the project was getting to know my peers. I got to know a lot of people I wouldn’t have otherwise talked too and it was really encouraging to know how willing everyone was to support me and go beyond in their work. On the flipside, a lot of socialisation really drains me, so having to talk to so many people left me exhausted and out of my routine for the whole month.

What aspects of this work do you think you excelled at? What skills did you gain or refine?

I was meantioned by name a few times for being very approachable and willing to listen and support my team members, which was encouraging because that is something I put a lot of effort into. I do think I need to improve my documentation and work out how best to communicate things to people outside my team. Although I think I did better than I had previously with delegation, I think having someone dedicated to admin from earlier on within the project would have made the final stages smoother.

What aspects did you find challenging? Why?

I really struggled with communication between production and my group. I think this was in part because we ended up following something closer to a waterfall process rather than scrum, so we were disconnected from other teams and after week two I had to created a lot of the goals for my team inderpendently. As I said in the group post-mortem, I think using a scrum development model would elivate a lot of these problems and would have allowed the design team members to feel less pressured.

How did this differ from your previous experience working in groups?

This was actually a far more postive experience than I have had previously. The majority of the group was really willing to work on the tasks I set them and even when they were not able to complete them they were good at communicating with me. Overall I had a lot more support with my work than I was expecting.

If you had the chance to work on a brief similar to this one what would you do differently?

Other than pushing to work in scrum and for more intergration with other teams I think I would want to make sure there were clear deliverables for each week. I think the nature of the project being a month long made people flip between thinkning it was too short and too open ended and I think having strictly enforced deadlines would help with this.

Proposed scrum teams

Week 1:

Ideation (design, tech & art)

Concept Design (2d artists/props designers + design)

Physical prototype

Scope & scale (technical artists + tech, teaching & choosing specifications)

summary of progress (producers)

Outcome: finalised concept with a project roadmap and inital backlog

Week 2:

Mechanic (tech + design)

level design/Environment (tech + art + design)

UI (tech + art + design)

Concept art (2d artists finalising designs)

summary of progress (producers)

Outcome: rough prototype w/ environment block out to start refining

Week 3: