So it’s time once again to let you know what we will be up to this week, by posting our “sprint of the week”, “project plane of the week”, “to-do list of the week” or just simple our focus area (work) this week. As last week this week will focus much on programming. On Wednesday we have a “game presentation” and we will show some gameplay of the game to some people in the industry. So there’s a lot of things that should be done before that.

Code
Make more AI patterns
Adjust player control (revive)
Enemy generator true triggers
Camera kontroll Concept (2d)
Menu & GUI (animation)
Particles

Level (2d)
Finalize level 1

3d
Make animations for foes

Narrative
Fraps animations for sound effects

Other things
Start to work on presentation
Sketch for trailer for GGA
GGA boot
Game play presentation

At first we had “Scrum sprints” that lasted about 4 weeks, but after the first sprint we decided to divide each 4 weeks sprint into 4 smaller “weekly sprints”. This so that the goals were more easy “to overview” and reach. This is roughly what the sprint of this week contains:

Code:
- Physics & colliding system
- Implement character control (hit, jump, magic and so on)
- Sketch on AI system

3D graphics:
- All the main characters done and animated
- Model enemies

2D graphics :
- Textures for all the main characters
- Concept of gems & gem system
- Graphics to the teaser

Level editor:
- Implement scripting

Narrative:
- Continue as planed

Levels:
- Continue making levels

Start on teaser

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)

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.

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

Two weeks ago I told you that we would start using the “project process management system tool” Scrum, and that I would keep you updated about it.

So this is how we use Scrum:
First we write down all the things that we want and need in the game (models, levels, AI, triggers and so on) in a document, called the “product backlog”. We then estimate how much time each task/thing will take and then categories and place them in the order they have to be done. After that we divide the PB into several smaller periods called sprints. Each sprint ends at a predefined date (milestone) where all the tasks in that sprint have to be done.

We start each day with a short (5-10 min) meeting where everyone tell each other what they did yesterday and what they will do today. This gives everyone insight of what everyone is doing and a chance to ask questions.
This way of working gives us a tool to keep track of all the features in the game and how much time we have left until the game’s complete.

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 : )