Chicken Scramble - Sprint 1

  To start off, this first sprint was kind of disorderly. Since we’re using a completely new project management tool with no prior experience, it took some time to get used to (and still getting used to it). I suppose for my other teammates it wasn’t a big deal but it was an added pound of stress to my shoulders as the producer. To add to that, there was some confusion between me and the designer as to what the whole game idea and aesthetic was.

My original idea for the game was a multiplayer maze in which the goal was for two players to compete to get to the other side of the maze. We could have ways for the players to mess around with each other, like using door switches to open and close doors. To clear up the confusion on what we were building, we set up a meeting to talk about it. To prepare, I made a design map of what I thought it should look like. (In the picture, the blue dots are door switches, yellow dots are checkpoints, and the red dot is where the enemy spawns. Blue lines are doors). I also asked the designer to draw up a map on what his vision of the game was like, but he didn’t do that (which was more than a little annoying).

Design Map of Original Idea

The designer questioned if it was truly fun for a player to get to the other side of the maze. He argued for a more single player experience, and that it’d be better for players to start in the middle of the maze and escape. I decided to concede to that since most playtesters are most likely not going to be playing with someone else. Multiplayer would have to be a wish.

Before this meeting, I proposed an idea that the player should be a chicken because of the dumb joke “Why did the chicken cross the road?”. That became the basis for the aesthetic of the game. Before, we were thinking of having it be somewhat of a horror-type game. It kind of seemed like people found the chicken idea a bit cringe, but it’s a starting point for what the game was gonna look like. We decided on shelving the horror idea for some other time and using a farm theme to match with the chicken. The chicken has to run away from the farmer to escape the maze!

In this class, we are using Jira, which is an industry standard project management tool. Previously, we had only used Trello. Technically Jira is better because it does a lot of things automatically for you but starting out, it’s really unwieldy.It took me a long time to figure out how to make a board and then another while figuring out how to organize the tasks. I still don't understand how to make an issue a child of an epic without just creating it like that from the start.

The mobile app is really non intuitive since it lacks a lot of the organization that’s in the website. A lot of the features of Jira are hidden which wastes a bunch of time that I could be using writing down user stories and making sure I have everything organized (which I still don’t feel like I do). For example, the “complete sprint” button wasn't in the default view of the board when I tried to end it and I couldn't edit the sprint, but when I changed to the enhanced view, it was there.

A producer’s role is a decent chunk of work on its own. Writing down all the user stories takes a long time. And during that time, I’ll forget things to write down or come up with things I need to immediately write. I’m 90% sure I’ve still forgotten to write down important user stories. There’s a lot of things to take into consideration that don't get shown on the Jira board. Because being a producer is so difficult, I’m taking a relatively small role in making the game. Mainly I just make the UI.

I don’t feel like that’s going to take too long, so eventually I’ll need to fill another role. Since our programmers have relatively busy lives outside of this class, I think I might need to fill a role there, but I’m hoping I’ll be a last resort since my confidence in it is very small.