Alienate
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Details
Role: Producer Members: 8 Duration: 2 months School year: 1 Engine: Unity Platform: PC Alienate is a remake of the original game Alien8, an isometric puzzle game for 8 bit computers in the 80's .
We were tasked with remaking this game, using modern knowledge and technology. We worked on improving the following 5 points, based on a thorough analysis of the game:
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Responsibilities
- Weekly task distribution and management during the sprints.
- Writing a team contract describing the expected behavior of all team members.
- Facilitating performance feedback meetings for the team.
- Managing QA and checking build stability.
- Setting up and maintaining day-to-day scrum tasks and progress.
- Being the vision holder for the project and keeping the team and teachers up to date on changes regarding this.
Lessons learned
Basics of scrum
During this first group project I learned how to work with the basics of Scrum. Since I only had experience working with waterfall and other linear project management tools, this was quite a change. The full product isn't determined when you first start and it feels like managing something that's alive and growing. This block I came in contact with all the basic elements of agile development including;
Team contract
When starting the project the team first agreed a contract wouldn't be necessary, and that we'd be able to solve any issues without it. After a few weeks however we noticed that due to the absence of a written agreement, people took the rules we set up less seriously. Results of this were for example people regularly being late for stand-ups and predefined naming conventions being disregarded. We therefore decided to set up a contract after all. After consequences were decided and included in the contract it was signed by all team members, which resulted in people adhering to these rules better.
Version control with Perforce
Working together on the same project with the whole team required us to work with a version control system. We had the luxury of using our schools Perforce client instead of using GitHub, but this did make it necessary for everyone to learn this new system. By having one of the programmers dive deeper into this and creating a small presentation explaining the functions we needed we saved researching time, and immediately created a small guide for future reference in case people had questions or issues working with the system. As well as an expert in the team who could take care of the more complex problems. Using this system taught me the basics of version control and will help me work with the program more easily in future projects.
Basics of scrum
During this first group project I learned how to work with the basics of Scrum. Since I only had experience working with waterfall and other linear project management tools, this was quite a change. The full product isn't determined when you first start and it feels like managing something that's alive and growing. This block I came in contact with all the basic elements of agile development including;
- Creating a backlog out of user stories
- Using planning poker to estimate those user stories with story points
- Setting up weekly sprints
- Day to day scrum tasks such as setting up a backlog
- Hosting sprint retrospectives and analyzing burn-down charts
Team contract
When starting the project the team first agreed a contract wouldn't be necessary, and that we'd be able to solve any issues without it. After a few weeks however we noticed that due to the absence of a written agreement, people took the rules we set up less seriously. Results of this were for example people regularly being late for stand-ups and predefined naming conventions being disregarded. We therefore decided to set up a contract after all. After consequences were decided and included in the contract it was signed by all team members, which resulted in people adhering to these rules better.
Version control with Perforce
Working together on the same project with the whole team required us to work with a version control system. We had the luxury of using our schools Perforce client instead of using GitHub, but this did make it necessary for everyone to learn this new system. By having one of the programmers dive deeper into this and creating a small presentation explaining the functions we needed we saved researching time, and immediately created a small guide for future reference in case people had questions or issues working with the system. As well as an expert in the team who could take care of the more complex problems. Using this system taught me the basics of version control and will help me work with the program more easily in future projects.