Relighting the Fire

Semester 2 Week 5 (2/14-2/21)
 
This week has been weird for me, for the first time on this team I didn't feel enthusiastic about the game.  I felt tired of the game and working upon it.  This was noticeable in the quantity of work I put out in the first half of the week and I was unhappy about my lack of productivity.  Resolving to sit down and work on Wednesday did not magically reinvigorate me or re-motivate me but it did help me find a place where I could do some happy coding for the project.

Wednesday was the first fully positive day I've had in a long time. Not to say that I haven't had good days recently or that Wednesday was the best day I've had in a while. Wednesday was a day of many small positives and no negatives, a day that will likely slip out of memory in a week or two but while it remains will brighten my life.  I resolved an issue that had been hampering my role as QA Liason for my team and really stressing me out, Professor Ferguson helped me get access to the QA Team sign up page of Canvas. I also got a lot of work done early in the day, then while waiting for the Legend Has It work meeting I got to play a fun game for a couple of hours. The day ended with a long work session that was very productive.  All throughout the day the weather was pleasant and did not bring down the day.

The rest of the week I had no issues with productivity and my malaise about the game gradually disappeared.  I managed to finish all my work and I feel good about my overall productivity for the week.  I am looking forward to getting this game to a place I can be proud to say that I helped make that game.

The Rough Beast of Bethlehem is Midterms

Semester 2 Week 4 (2/7-2/13)

 

Last week I became a third wheel.  I didn't have a specific focus for my work and if felt like I was playing a supporting role in all of my tasks.  I found myself with plenty to do but worried about running out of tasks to do which depending on the project is a great or terrifying occurrence.  I don't think that the project I am on is off track but sometimes we struggle to declare all of our tasks at the start of the week and I try to be careful how much work I assign to myself.  Another factor is that now that I am in charge of QA I get assigned fewer programming tasks so that I don't get overloaded with work.  

This last week has been all about feelings.  I've always worried about how good I am at programming and how much time I spend working.  Most of the time I can push these fears away because I know that I am not an objective judge of my own work.  Both teams that I have worked on this semester have really helped me feel like I am contributing meaningful work and driven away much of that feeling.

The criteria for our midterms deliverable that terrifies me most is a stable tested build.  Not because we won't have it but because it means we will have our whole tutorial and over-world level progression done and figured out and stable and tested.  I simply don't know if I can imagine that and that freaks me out whether or not it is actually a problem.  Overall I think that we are mostly on track to reaching our midterm goals though the implementation of the over-world has really thrown a wrench into what the game looks, feels and plays like.

The Journey to the Center of Me

Semester 2 Week 3 (1/31-2/6)

This week we shook our working practices out and revised them when they didn't work. Will and I took on our new responsibilities while the team adjusted to a revised sprint schedule.  This week culminated in a pretty disastrous QA session which while extremely problematic exposed several issues with how we had been proceeding that can now be addressed.

Will took over as the Scrumlord and he set about revising our scrum habits and sprint schedule with a lot of energy. It was really refreshing to have a confident and steady hand at the tiller though I really don't like Sunday work meetings. I think Will has done a really good job getting everyone to report what they've done each day at scrum and he's worked to make scrum more relevant to how we work.  I've had an eventful first week as the QA Liaison for my team, after going over the documentation early in the week I discovered on Thursday we did not have a stable build (despite that having been a specific work goal the day before). Despite the team's best efforts we did not have a stable build before QA on Thursday. However since then we have taken the lessons we learned and refined our build policy so that we will reliably have a stable build in time for QA.

I think it would be helpful to have a critique of the story and feel of the game. Right now it sometimes feels like the team is so completely sold on the story that none of us are questioning it when it needs to be questioned.