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.

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.

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.

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

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.

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

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