Dev Log 2.1: Pre-Production

In terms of pre-production, I find that the team was overall successful. 

However, most issues we faced arose from the team’s overall inexperience with a detailed streamline of planning — and the unforeseen risk of losing a member. Discussing these issues first, it is true that the team wasn’t always on track, especially near the beginning of pre-production. While many of us had a general understanding of  what the game was about and what it would “look” like, by assigning respective parts of the GDD to each team member, we learned that not everybody was on the same page. There was major misunderstanding over the player mechanics, which was very important to establish as a team. This had been the biggest obstacle during the first major assignment, which was easily addressed through long meetings and team discussions.

The second issue came along with the second assignment. While the process of scheduling and creating the project plan was generally smooth, we faced a large risk a couple of days prior to the deadline and presentation — we were going to lose a whole member. The programmer. 

Damn.

It wasn’t a shock, per se. There was nothing we could really do about it, except maybe beg but we weren’t exactly desperate. Rather, we ran into the issue of having to re-delegate our tasks. Which was, to put it simply, a pain in the ass. Delegating programming tasks to members of the team who were under the impression they would not have to write a single line of code for the game was something the team had to evaluate carefully. With mutual understanding that we would split the tasks in the risk analysis document, we were able to outline our roles, as well as cut down on tasks that weren’t integral within our own core departments.

For what it was worth, the team did manage to overcome this (despite the dramatic turmoil). Team bonding works, fellas! With what we were working with, we were able to take all of what the programmer had listed and delegated his tasks accordingly to the rest of the group. We outlined to each other our comforts and discomforts with the newfound role we all found ourself taking, and were able to create a clean Trello with appropriate due dates and assigned members — all the while maintaining the previous tasks we withheld before.  It was something we had to prepare for through our risk analysis, and agreed we all understood that out workload would increase.

Despite this, I do believe my team will be able to achieve what we set out for each other — or at least have a good, insightful time trying.