To be honest, I'm not sure what to write for this postmortem. I feel like there is so much to say, but also so little as I've chronicled my experiences so far during these blog posts. Because of this, I believe that this post may actually be shorter than most postmortems as there really is only a couple of things I want to talk about.
The first topic is my team in general. If there is one reason why Tales from Space should have moved forward into full production, it is because of this team. I mentioned it in my last blog post and it's come up in other post, but this lead team in phenomenal in terms of ability. I've had time to think about what makes this group work so well together during the last week or so. I've come up with two primary answers: work ethic and honest integrity.
I didn't select every member of this team, but the ones I chose, I selected because they had proven to me in the past to have a strong work ethic. They weren't necessarily the most talented in their fields, but they all ranked high when it came to getting the job done - even at the cost to their own free time. Their will and drive to succeed is what made this project a success. It's this same drive that gives them great leadership potential when bringing on new members. I would rather work with this current team, than any I've worked with in the past.
The second factor is honest integrity. Early on, we chose to create expectation for the team members to abide by. This kept each of us accountable to each other, and was backed up by a written document. One of the most important expectations that we each agreed to (in my opinion) was that we would work to be unafraid and honest with each other. This meant that we could call each other out when someone let the group down, as well as praise and build each other up for excelling in their sprint. This was supplemented by a mandatory sprint retrospective each week that gave us the time and place for these conversations to happen. There isn't a single member on the lead team that wasn't called out for something at some point. There also isn't a single lead who didn't, at some point, call out another lead for something that needed to change.
The beauty is that we quickly learned that this was okay and necessary to improve our process. Everyone on this team learned and grew into a better team member, and a better professional in their related field. Even more so, each of us grew to trust each other more fully as we did this. What's interesting is that our calling each other out for problems actually made us all grow closer as a team. This is something that the leads and I have all agreed to prioritize with each new member of the team next semester.
The other aspect I want to talk about in this postmortem is my own, personal development as a producer. To be honest, I feel like I could have done much better this semester in terms of being prepared or focusing the team and project. I didn't miss the metaphoric ball entirely, but I tended to fumble with it a lot before finally catching it and securing an opinion or course of action. For instance, networking should have been put on the back burner sooner, full design decisions took much longer to flesh out than they should have, and AI should have been stronger in our game at the start. These are all things I would prioritize or do differently if I could start over again.
While I think it's important for the producer to trust and rely on his team, I also think there is a line and I relied on them too much without taking more initiative myself. For instance, my programmer did many of the docs of his own accord that I should have considered doing myself and taken on as part of my own process. To be clear, these weren't programmer documents but team based documents to help us focus or streamline. While I'm grateful he took on those jobs, and that I could learn from him, I wish that I had realized the importance of them myself and jumped to it. I also wish that I had dove into our repo. a bit and at least learned how to pull and track things in there. This is something I still need to do, and will learn moving forward into next semester.
Ultimately, this has been a heck of a semester with many ups and downs. There is no better team to experience those ups and downs with, than this one: Bullet Mullet.
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