The end of alpha
Well, our journey to make a great videogame is just a little bit over halfway done. This week saw the conclusion of our alpha production cycle. I wanted to make this additional blog post to keep you updated on the current progress of Crimson Herbicide. This post will contain a few shorter closer looks section with no quick hits. The team has had to work through some things this past month, but I am proud of the effort and commitment they have for the project. Here’s to a strong finish!
A closer look - Holding the team accountable
I talked about this in my previous post, but on the off chance you missed it, here’s the skinny. While working through some performance issues with a team member, it was brought to my attention that I needed to hold her accountable to her work. That was something I was not doing for her or the team. At the time, my thought was “Who am I to tell a student how much work to do in a sprint?” I am not an expert in art or programming. If a team member can only do X amount of work, they shouldn’t be held accountable to my Y number. This then turned into an environment where if a task wasn’t completed, we would just “get it done next time.”
I thought I was doing the individual a favor by not holding them to a standard they cannot reach based on some random criteria I came up with. The point I was missing was that I needed to trust the person on how much work they said they could complete and hold them accountable, each sprint, to that work. In essence, let them tell me what their Y is, and we will make sure the X gets there. If their X didn’t get to where we needed it, then we could have the open conversations during the sprint rituals and take ownership of our own development. In letting things slide, I prevented team members learning from their mistakes. Overall production slowed and stress was added to certain members of the team. This one is on me.
At the start of this sprint, I held the team accountable. I talked about how, as a whole, we were running out of time on the project, and we need to do all that we can to finish strong. To help finish strong, we pull the work we need to do and hold each other accountable to getting that work done. Going back to the basics, I went person by person during sprint planning, asking what they were pulling and how long it would take to do. At the end of the meeting, I reaffirmed with each team member that they could get that work done. Another gauntlet was thrown down.
The team did not disappoint! The amount of energy within the team and the number of tasks completed was a visible thing. I could SEE team members being more active in their work and conversations with each other. I even had a few team members confide in me that they were glad I was being ‘mean.’ Not mean in a bad way of course, they just work better when someone is pushing them a little. As for the sprint, the team was able to get almost 3 weeks’ worth of tasks completed in two weeks. This is definitely something I need to keep doing throughout production.
A closer look - 2nd round of 1-on-1s
Completed my second and final round of 1-on-1s that I’ve planned to do on this project. Overall, some good answers and information provided by the team. Below is a quick rundown of the questions and a summary of the team’s answers.
How do you feel like the project is going so far? - Overall, the team felt like the project was going well. The art team was a little stressed at the time of this 1-on-1, but they felt good with the plan and amount of work left. Another team member said he noticed a difference with the team after I gave them an “ass whooping”. I swear, I was not that harsh and am I that mean…sigh.
How do you feel about the progress of your work? - Some members talked about feeling good with their work. A few were ahead of schedule and were also working on the project, from home, during the weekend. I made it clear that was not expected of them. They just wanted to do the work; they were enjoying it. Other team members were not happy with how they started out. Saying they either procrastinated or some of their tasks took longer than it should have.
Do you have concerns with development? - Only concern from the team was art’s inconsistent pipeline. During these conversations I talked to everyone about our current situation and the plan we had going forward. This helped ease the minds of the group.
Are you having fun? - Everyone said they were having a good time. Answers ranged from “teammates are not stressors” to “yeah” to a thumbs up.
Do you feel like you will accomplish your goals you had at the start of this project? - This is another area where the team feels like they are in a good position. During our conversation, Abi and I came up with a way for her to show off her environmental skills a little bit more on the title screen.
I want to talk to you about your development. - I took this time to talk to each individual and stress the importance to writing down their experiences. It is something they can refer back to when talking about a specific situation in an interview or networking. My goal is to get them to write it down while it is still fresh in their head and not try to recall details on an event that happened 6 months ago.
What can I do to improve or make your production experience better? - Again, this is another area where the team was in agreeance. The team felt like I was doing everything I needed to do, to help them be successful. I did leave the door open for any future feedback any of them might have for me.
A closer look - Sprint results
Well as you can tell, the theme around here is the end of Alpha. I think the team has done a great job with the amount of work they’ve created but we still have a good amount of work ahead of us. If you have been reading my other posts, we are a little behind in the art department. This inconsistent throughput has caused us to miss completing all of our Alpha milestone objectives. While we only missed completing three deliverables, those tasks were part of the art department. Proving that we simply cannot put out the amount of work we expected, and I planned for. Changes need to be made. I will cover that in the next section.
Looking at the big picture, the project is ahead of schedule. I posted a photo about our progress a few weeks ago, but I don’t think I went into the details too much. The project tracking software we are using allows us to have a ‘Design Model’ that allows us to track tasks for a given aspect of production. To the right, this is where we were sitting at the end of Alpha for the whole project. As it just happened to work out, we had a 10-week production window from when starting our shift to SIX and the delivery date. So luckily for me, I just need to remember we need to progress 10% every week to stay on-track. Of course, there is much more to it than that. This is an easy way to show the team where the project stands at any given moment. The end of Alpha represents our 6th week of our SIX production, so we are currently almost a week ahead of schedule. This number is higher mainly to the fact that Ryan, our programmer, has been able to complete most of his work a lot sooner than expected.
As you can see on the left, I have broken down the project into different sections of the game. The overall SIX folder to keep track of the project’s status. I then have things separated into the main menu and introduction. Both of those aspects are nearly complete and are just waiting on 2D are to be finished. I divided the main level into the three disciplines. The goal was to keep an eye on the bigger picture. I know there might be a different/better way to track tasks and progress, but this works for our needs. As I said before, Programming is a head of the curve and only has a few basic tasks left before he spends the rest of his time polishing and stepping on some bugs. Design mainly needs to finish up on some sound implementation, combat balancing and final polish on room geo. The art team is currently behind. Including the work that they need to do for the title screen and introduction, they are sitting at 55% complete. Remember, they needed to be at 60% to stay on track. Though they have made progress over the past few weeks, changes need to happen based on their throughput. The work the art team has left is textures, animations, lighting, and 2D/UI elements.
Let’s talk about why we need to make changes for the game. To the right, is the estimated amount of time left for each artist. Sierra is my flex artist who can support either Abi or Megan if they need it. Both Megan and Sierra have two different hour estimates. This is based off the player weapon textures. The initial plan was to have Megan do them. But Sierra is able to back fill if needed. I am leaning towards having Sierra doing them, but Megan insisted she could get her work caught up. Abi looks like her workload might be a little tight, but we are planning a full sprint of time for her to work on lighting. We do not know how long it will take her, so we decided to overestimate that time. With Sierra doing the player weapon textures, it looks like the team will have enough time to get everything done…right? Well, that’s the problem. These numbers are based off each artist being able to complete 26 hours of work per sprint. A goal the team has failed to reach at any point during development. It took me a little time to hold the team accountable. It took a little time to allow team members to fail and learn from their mistakes. We do not have the time to be imperfect and still complete all of our art tasks by the ship date. A decision needs to be made.
A closer look - A fork in the road
As a whole, I think the morale of the team is good. I think the team is having a good time making this game. I know they are learning a lot from the experience. I would be lying if I said there hasn’t been some stress the past few weeks. One of my goals for this project was for everyone to have fun and minimize the stress. Too many times you hear stories from the industry where people are burnt out or not happy because difficult decisions were not made at the correct time. So, is this one of those times? I honestly do not know. But it is definitely one of those times where we need to have that conversation. Knowing that we will have a hard time reaching the goals we set for ourselves at our current pace, I presented the team with two plans…
We focus on only making one level for the entirety of production, with the possibility of missing our SIX deadline. Allowing us to spend the remaining time completing art assets, at a slower pace, and polishing the heck out of the game. This option allows for less stress and ensures we have plenty of time to complete the game. This is the safe bet.
Continue to develop for SIX as normal. Make some changes to enemy units to cut down on animation time. Rearrange priorities and prepare to cut items out of the game if we run out of time. Team members commit to doing extra work at night and weekends if they are not able to get them done during the week. With this plan, we will have a better overall product. But if we fail, the product will be less than the option 1 plan. Higher risk, higher reward.
I gave the team a weekend to think about what they want out of this project. We will talk about it during our next sprint planning meeting. But I know this team. They will not want to back away from a challenge. They will pick option 2.
