Industry feedback
Another sprint and another blog post. The team and I have continued development on Crimson Herbicide. This sprint’s post will be a rather short one. There was not a lot to report on, and some things I am waiting until the end of Alpha to talk about. The one thing I wanted to mention was that the team and I did a presentation and received feedback from a panel of industry professionals about our game. Overall, the experience and feedback was great. Team members had the opportunity to speak in front of a group present information and answer questions. The feedback we received was solid and nothing that was a ‘red flag’ that something was wrong with our development.
Quick hits
Team spent the first week of the sprint preparing for our industry presentation. Not all team members were impacted, but it did cut into our overall production.
Talked to the team about the importance of contributing to the sprint rituals. I stated that if every answer is ‘eh, I am fine’ or ‘I got nothing’ we are going to feel like the sprint rituals are useless. I explained that we will only get out of those meetings what we put in. I will strive to have more meaningful conversations going forward.
The art team continues to struggle to reach their throughput. Several situations happened over the course of the sprint. Some situations were outside of the team’s control, while others were controllable. Another conversation take place during sprint planning, and I will talk about this situation as a whole during a future blog post.
Quick status update
A quiet sprint over here at Umbrella Studios. We lost a little bit of our production capacity with the industry panel, but nothing too crazy. With 3 sprints remaining, before our SIX due date, both programming and design are in good positions to complete all of their work on time. As mentioned above, the art team is still struggling to get their work out on a consistent basis. We currently have enough time to reach our goals, but we have burned through most of our buffer time. If our next sprint does not go well, we will need to make hard choices of what to cut and where to focus our remaining time. As mentioned above, I will go into a lot more detail in a future blog post.
