Project Review

 

I am the team leader of Anima Mundi, and from the beginning that title has scared me. I felt a lot of pressure and responsibility within this role. However, I do think I did the best I could to be a good team leader throughout, despite how challenging some of the problems we faced were.

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At the very beginning of the project I put a lot of focus into developing a decent project pipeline, a timetable that was not too specific and gather as much information and planning as I could for the development of this vertical slice. I wanted to know everything about the Anima Mundi game design and what we should choose to implement in our vertical slice. This was a big concern of min at the beginning. I was worried about creating a plan that was either too large or too small and I think as a result of this concern, I neglected setting appropriate tasks and planning better ahead for the process of development. I could have done better to organise tasks so they were a little more specific. For example when I assigned Molly the character animations, I should have set those animation one by one and given her stricter deadlines for each which would have made organisation for both of us a lot easier and would have been reflective of those pipeline processes we were supposed to demonstrate.

 

I do think that organisation was mostly decent throughout the project. We had created a thorough project scope by the end of week three with all the pipeline and key milestone dates, as well as an organised team schedule table, made in excel. Tasks, while difficult to assign were given out as soon as someone had finished their previous task, unless they did not tell me that they had finished and did not have more to do. I set up a Trello board at the beginning of the project and I have to admit this was neglected after the first few weeks but it honestly was not a very helpful tool other than to keep track of important pieces of work we all needed access to. Slack was always the best method for discussion and updates on progress and I could always expect a fast reply from people on there. We also tried a Miro board at a point in the project when communication was at a low, but again it just wasn't helpful to have information spread across different places. 

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The best method of communication, organisation and setting tasks was always over a call on slack or teams. In these calls it was so much easier to get feedback, discuss plans for the next weeks and any issues that had arisen. Despite members of the team not being very talkative or contributing to discussion I still stand by this being the most effective form of communication because talking to people in real tie leaves no room for misinterpretation or ignorance. And towards the end of the project, those quieter members of the group did become more comfortable and became more active in discussion which was really lovely to see. If I were to go back and do this project differently, it would definitely be to schedule more of these team calls, especially nearer the beginning of the project and encourage more input from the rest of the ream surrounding the plans for the project, because that part was very difficult to juggle alone. Towards the end, Emilia and Charisma both set up some google documents for the organization of assets, for development which was really great and thoughtful of them both.

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My role in the process of development was primarily programming the game in unity. I was happy with when I began this development, a week earlier than the planned milestone. But I do wish I started training and put more hours into it from when  started because I did really struggle with learning a new skill and getting it all done the best I could. That being said, I really enjoyed the project for the reason that I did learn a new skill and have promised myself I will put more time into it over the summer to become more proficient in programming in preparation for next year on the course. As a 2D artist I was a little disappointed I did not have more of an artistic input in the vertical slice but I understood that as a team of five 2D artists, there had to be some adaptions to  make.

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Other ways I tried my best to support the rest of the development team was giving honest and helpful feedback throughout. I know sometimes I was quite slow to respond because I had difficult thing going on in my personal life but I still tried to get back to them on what I thought about their work whether that be in slack conversations or during a team call. I think I did add value to the conversations we had about development and I always offered a hand or suggestion when someone stressed that they were having difficulties with one of their tasks, as well as offering a solution to any problems we had as a team over the process. 

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As it was my job to implement all of our features and assets into unity and we did manage to tick almost everything of our feature and asset lists by the deadline, I do think I contributed well enough tot he vertical slice. I am regretful that I did not do more background work and manage to implement parallax scrolling but I think despite that, we have made a really amazing thing and we should all be proud of ourselves.

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The Postmortem

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The project goals were to                 Create the vertical slice by the 20th May.

                                                              Implement every feature/asset proposed in the project scope.

                                                              Improve skills and technical ability.

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The Anima Mundi team have done an amazing job and as a team we succeeded in meeting these goals. Every member of the team levelled up, whether that be in learning a new skill such as programming, animation or lighting effect, as well as improving their technical ability in those areas.

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My personal goal was to improve my skills in programming. At the start of the project I had very little experience, only knowing what I understood from lectures last year. Now at the end of the project I can say I successfully programmed my game prototype that is fully functional. I have learned so much about programming and the use of unity over the course of this project and I am thankful for the journey.

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What we did well:

• We did a really great job at giving critical feedback that was actually helpful and helped each other to improve our individual work. We always tested assets as they were created, making the most of the time we had and working efficiently.

• Meeting Milestones! We were ahead of each stage of development with our milestones and stayed on track throughout he project other than for play-testing but that of course has been very difficult tom manage with Covid. 

• Establishing an appropriately sizes and planned project scope that was neither too large or too small.

• Levelled up! Each member of the team tried something new on this project and made something amazing in the process!

• Every member of the team was consistently respectful and considerate of each other.

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What we did not do so well:

• Not enough discussion about the process of work being done.

• Not enough contribution to team discussions from some departments.

• Not enough time put into planning at the beginning of the project so at points we got confused about what was expected of each other.