An old friends is back, mr “Weekly meeting”. It’s been a while but yesterday he was back. We only discussed the feedback we got from all the people playing PoH at GGA and what we should do about it. It was things from easier way to hit enemies, animation corrections, character tweaking to leveling suggestions. Some of the things will take about 1h to change/try while other things might take up to a week to change (for one person) so after we have put everything down on paper we’ll estimate how long it will take to do and what priority it has.

We also discussed how much people can work this summer and what time they will be away on vacations.

Todays meeting was mostly focused on things related to the deadlines for SGA (Sweden Game Awards) and GGA (Gotland Game Awards). We mostly discussed different versions of the the new video trailer and what things to priorities the next weeks. We have so much to do the next three weeks that we really can’t afford to sleep, then in the middle of it some of us are going to Nordic Games. Well on top of that there’s about 2-3 major things to do also.

Anyway why sleep when you can work?

Before I post what we discussed on todays weekly meeting, I just want to post a picture of the “Databox team” (we who makes “Penalty of Heroes”).  Some people are missing though, from left to right, Dwarf, Jakob, Baba, Jona Nixi, Stoffer, Håkan (in the tree).

We had a short meeting today since we have a lot of things to do. Things we discussed were the use of shadows in game (we have done some research of it), when we should release screenshots (more “tech” is now in and it starts to look more like the final game). We also discussed how we should divide the programing tasks (we are 4 programmers now) and the sound fx and the music in the game.

Today and tomorrw we will have some nice visitors at our office, so we planed a bit of that and we also cleaned the office : ) We probably post a post in here about the visitors in a few days.

* It’s great spring weather right now in Sweden around 20+ Celsius (68+ Fahrenheit), blue sky and it’s been like this for about 2-3 week now (I’m outside right now, really nice to have wireless broadband)

The meeting started for the first time at the given time : ) Maybe because we had a lot to discuss today.We discussed one really big thing that just had come up and we decided that we would bring that up again after easter so everyone could have a good think about it. We also discussed what things that on schedule with and what things we’re behind in. Since we haven’t been able to get on schedule with the programming (the programmers have had other school assignments) we had some suggestions on how to get on track again. This was the two main discussions at todays meeting. Now it’s back to work all easter long : (

** Today in Sweden it’s kalled “skär torsdag” and the “folk tale” says that today is the day when the witches goes to the island of “Blåkulla” (here in Sweden) to have a gathering. So today many children in Sweden dress up like witches and go from door to dor to get candy (kind of Halloween)

Today we had one of the shortest weekly meetings in the history of Databox. It was about 45 minutes including the “ordinary” 15 minute delay.

Today we discussed next week “game panel” presentation and who is gonna make it and if we needed any new layout (or use the last one). We haven’t heard which people or from which game companies that will be present, so it might be the people from last presentation (better ask mr T).

Since we stated “major sprint 4″ this Tuesday we went though what went right and wrong in sprint 3. The coding is still a bit behind, but that’s mainly because Baba and Jakob have had programming classes the last 2 weeks. The 3d modeling is also speeding up and we’re on track there.

Sprint 4 is a pure production period, no more testing or concepting. The game is up and running, the level editor is stable and it’s just about putting content together and make a game.

This weekly meeting started just 15 minutes late :p The work hours was discussed … again (mostly so everyone work at the same time).

Today we mainly discussed the enemies of Penalty of Heroes and if we can make different versions of them to get more types of enemies.

On Tuesday it’s stop for “major sprint 3″ (each “major sprint” is divided into 3-4 weekly sprints), so we discussed which tasks are done or behind schedule.

So it’s was time for the weekly big meeting. As usual we stared the meeting about 20-30 minutes late. Today it was due to the heavy discussion that went on for about 30 minutes. The discussion was which girl is the best looking, not gonna name any names but there were actresses , porn stars and artists in the discussion. Today we mostly discussed the contract for Databox Games and future of Databox Games for the next 2 years. We also discussed:

• Discussing the enemies
• Dangers/threats for PoH being released
• New things on the “wish list”

This meeting was extra long (nearly 4 hours), but it was mainly to solve everything with the company.

Just as last weeks “weekly meeting”, not everyone was there (some had lectures). We really didn’t had an agenda when we started, but after a few minutes of talk we suddenly had a lot to talk about. It was very much talk about what will happen in the next few month, about how we’re doing (compared to our scrum plan) and what will happen this summer (holidays, work and so on). We also discussed what different trailer/videos we will/should have.

This meeting also cleared a lot of things for the future so, now we know what we’re aiming for and what to expect (a bit cryptic, I know :p)

Yeah, we also got conference microphones after about 3 month after ordering one. This so that people that attending the meeting though “Skype”/Marratech

* We also have some new news about the music for the game, but we’ll tell you more about it in a few days.

Yesterdays weekly meeting was shorter that it use to be. This was mainly because we were only 4 people present (some people had lectures) and the things we had on the agenda was with the people that weren’t there. The main thing we discussed was how the main page for Penalty of heroes is going to look like.

As always on Thursdays we had our big weekly meeting today. Today it was the first time we discussed all the things that had been written down on the “wish list”. There were around 15 ideas and I think it was only 3 suggestions that were put away directly, 4 were considered to be implemented and the rest was considered “ok” (Ok = will be implemented if we have time).

We discussed the progress of sprint 2 and the beginning of sprint 3 (starts next week). We also discussed that we might divide the “major sprints” into smaller “weekly sprints”, this so that it becomes more of weekly goals instead on “monthly goals”. The risk of having a “monthly goal” is that you might focus and work 3 weeks with one thing and when the last week of the sprint comes you suddenly realize that you haven’t done all the other stuff you were supposed to do during the whole sprint.

We talked about motion capture (which we should try tonight : ) and what type of script function we would like to have in the game.

There were also some other smaller stuff that we discussed today.

Today we had a on-line meeting/seminar with Kjartan Vidarsson that now work as a producer at NDS, he worked previously at Deadline Games and IO Interactive.

Kjartan first talked about his experience with Scrum and then let us talk about our game and how we use Scrum. It was very productive to discuss how we use Scrum with a person that handled over 100 Scrum teams over the years. We mostly discussed how we used Scrum and how we could manage things to get more effective.

Some of the things he suggested were:
- We could get in trouble because our team is around 10 people and the ideal size of Scrum team is around 3-6 people.
- We should have our daily Scrums meetings earlier than 14.00 (2 pm)
- We should have a voting system for what new features we should implement and focus on.
- We should modify our release plans and have more “test released” planed.
- We should define and have a protocol where we could measure if a task was done or not in a Sprint.

One nice thing was that when Kjartan got our main “scrum document” (we send it to him in the middle of the meeting) he was quiet for some time and we asked why he didn’t say anything and he said that he was really impressed by it. Though he didn’t really understand some of the not used (filled in) pages we had in the document. When we told him that it was “burn down charts” (that we didn’t really use) he was even more impressed.

Kjartan also told us that he was looking forward to hear and see more about Penalty of Heroes. It’s things like that that makes you work even harder : )

* HERE’s an old blog post how we use scrum in development of PoH

On the meeting tomorrow we’ll have a lot of different things to discuss such as how big the characters will be on the screen, coming events (such as SGA, GGA, Nordic Games), the music (new music guy on the team), the narrative and different things regarding the level editor.

On Friday we’re going to have a very interesting on-line lecture/seminar mainly about Scrum with Kjartan Vidarsson that has been a producer at Deadline Games (Chili con Carnage, Faith and a .45, Total Overdose) and he also worked at IO (Hitman, Kane & Lynch, Freedom Fighters). He’ll have a look how we use Scrum when we work on PoH and he’ll come with suggestions how to improve things (there’s always room for improvements).
It’s going to be really interesting.