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.

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)

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.

Yes we have one to. Our mascot is a rubber mouse name “Grodan” that will give us luck (maybe our WC will be done in time, more people will attend to the daily scrum meeting)

At yesterdays meeting we decided that we had to do something about people dropping in late for meetings. Two persons showed up in time and then people dropped in over 1 hour late. We had brought up this problem before and it was mostly generated by the fact that people stayed up until 06.00 in the morning working.
Anyway we decided that a Penalty will be in place for being late to a meeting:

The fees:
20 skr (≈$2.5) being late for a weekly meeting
10 skr (≈$1.3) being late for a Scrum meeting

All money will be collected in a “party pot” and will support the companies parties :p

At the weekly meeting yesterday I asked everyone to each give me some material for the blog. I just got this video from Nixi and he told me to put it on the blog. He said that the video shows how he and Tekie are testing to import a 3d model into the game engine. Well I’m not sure if he’s doing that or if he’s just telling me that I was annoying to give him that assignment or both*lol. Check out the video and you’ll probably figure it out. This won’t end up in PoH, unless Playboy buys Databox Games :p

Yepp, everyone’s back from the holidays. We started it right away with a meeting about what and when we’ll be doing stuff for the next 6-8 month. Håkan was especially happy since both his computer and scooter (snow mobile) had broken down.

Now it’s a new year and with new year comes new routines. Before Christmas has been more of a research face where everyone has been in preproduction. The programmers have been coding the engine, narrative has been written and the artists have been sketching.
So now when all the preproduction have been done we’ll be starting to use the project management tool/system Scrum to get everyone working tight together. With Scrum we’ll have daily meetings and work towards common milestones.

We’ll keep you updated how things work out with Scrum : )

We have one weekly meeting (Thursdays at 10.00). At these meetings we discuss what we should focus on and do the next week so that everyone in the team knows what to be done. These meetings takes anywhere from 1-3 hours. Here’s a weekly meeting protocol, by the way, it’s in Swedish.

Meeting protocol