I feel like most of my posts have been negative lately. I apologize for that. I truly don't mean to be negative but I just can't help but find myself frustrated with the progress of this project, and the team. As I mentioned in my last post, many team members failed to jump back into the swing of the project last sprint. Even more frustrating to me is that these members are highly capable, and were here at school for the entire week. There really wasn't an excuse for not checking in about tasks or getting their work on the board.
Some of this is being addressed this sprint. As mentioned in the previous post, we tried a different process in class on Friday that was both better and a little bit rougher. The rough point was trying to do a quick Sprint Review with the entire team. Many of them seemed completely disengaged with the process. I'm going to try it next week just the same because we need to find more individual accountability for members of the team. So much work hasn't been done and then fallen through the cracks. The other reason for the review is to hold the leads accountable for reviewing their teams work. During the sprint review, I ask each lead if they reviewed a task and if it's currently in engine. This helps relay the importance of fully completing work in a timely manner to the team, as well as reviewing that work for the leads.
The positive side of class time changes is that the play session of everyone getting into the build was quite successful. People finally were seeing where their work went and getting a taste of, not only the flaws, but successes of this project. It was actually somewhat invigorating for me to see the team get a bit excited. Only real downside was that I couldn't play myself as I was taking notes on our professors thoughts and comments (he also played during that time). Even though I'm frustrated with this project in many ways, I'm really excited to finally be seeing some of these pieces come together. To be clear, it's very late for this occurrence, but it's still nice to see our efforts beginning to pay off.
This next sprint represents our run to Beta. That means that the game must be playable from start to finish with an end-game and no game-breaking bugs. I think this is do-able for us, but it is rough that it will be the first time some of these levels have seen the light of day outside of the development branch in our repo. As for my job, I'm tasked with getting the camera for our team reel and beginning the capture process from that. This isn't something I'm particularly trained in but what the heck - its got to be done. Beyond that, I'll stay on pulling (or pushing depending on the team member) my team forward toward this new objective.