This post is coming in late but it's been a heck of a week. I'll start at the beginning. Class time came and was possibly the most productive class we've had all semester. The leads really stepped up during the past week and reviewed their teams work in a timely manner so that sprint review in class was a simple matter of only a couple tasks being left on the board. Credit to the team as well for getting their tasks in on time (by our sprint's "soft close") so that the leads had time to review and provide genuine feedback. Beyond that, the play session was again useful for gaining a wider knowledge of our game's current state. I was taking notes on our professor's play through. There was a lot but the exciting part is that we technically passed Beta! This was a success compared to last time when we fell short of the Alpha requirements. The rough part was that our professor had two words for us after issuing the Beta pass verdict: Bugs & Feedback. Our game is full of bugs and sorely lacks player feedback in many aspects. This is going to be our focus for last couple of sprints we have.
Speaking of which, we only have this sprint, and the next one for full weeks. After that, we have a half week sprint before the game is due for senior show. I'm so nervous about it. I've put so much into this but at the same time, it's nowhere near good enough to be considered a proper senior game at this point. There's too much that got cut from the original. This game feels like a shell of what it was supposed to be.
One thing that will really help our game is voice over work for our narration. This was a lot of my job this week - setting up recording with our actor, going over and re-writing lines for him, and providing feedback while he was in session. All in all, it's great to hear the lines and I'm very excited to hear it all click in game. This is something our professor said a couple weeks ago that would really help us sell the narrative and world of our game. I'm not a fan of pushing it this late for something so crucial, but hearing the lines today gave me a lot of hope. Our team reel for the senior show is also something that is being worked on over the next couple weeks. My lead artist has some experience with video editing so he is taking that project on. I did manage to record the last few members of the team on Sunday for the reel, so that's good to have out of the way. Because of that, I was able to better prepare lines for our voice actor (the very same) so he could narrate our reel in that 50's style radio voice. Should be interesting to see it come together. The only downside is that the good microphone busted during recording the footage of the team members, so we'll have to schedule another recording session to dub over the final reel audio.
The last thing I want to talk about unfortunately is another negative thing that I need to address. While last week went really well for team members getting their work done on time, this week it seems that we're back to the usual form. We'll see tomorrow (or I guess it's technically later today) in class if they manage to complete all their tasks. Regardless, it appears that very few members met the soft close of the sprint. This means my lead team has not been able to provide feedback to them. I'll be addressing this during the lead meeting before class and during class itself. To the leads, I'm going to stress the importance that they ask their... subordinates to get that stuff in throughout the week. If it all comes at once, it gives way less time for proper review and then changes to be implemented. During class, I'm going to stress to the team that meeting the soft close is very important for numerous reasons; we create the build right after the soft close, this is taken to QA, and finally the individual work is reviewed for completion and consistency.
Hopefully class goes well and the team gets it in gear for this last full sprint. There is a lot to get done. If we fail the sprint, it's likely the game will lack that polish or fix by the end.