Escherreal - A Graduate School Team Project
I was the Development Director of our FIEA capstone game entitled Escherreal. It was a small team of 15 students so we all wore multiple hats and did whatever we had to do to get the project done and done well. Though I was the Scrum Master, I was also the primary level builder for the project, which was an interesting dichotomy. I put together a 2-part video talking about our implementation of Scrum.
Part 1 - Escher Scrum
Part 2 - What is a BurnUp Chart?
Certified Scrum Master
After working on Escherreal for a semester I decided to go after my ScrumMaster Certification. I wanted to learn more about Scrum, especially as it applied to other industries and not just Game Development. Most of what the course covered was information that I had already been using. However, there were two useful tidbits of information that I was glad I learned. The first was a better understanding of story points as estimation metrics. The second was the importance, and use, of data tracking, with artifacts like Burndown and Velocity Charts.
Venture Track Companies and Products
| Hiyaaa Games, LLC | Two-Up Games, LLC | NoMoar Games, LLC |
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| Corgi Caper | Nightmarry | Telemon |
My last semester at FIEA was spent in the Venture Track program. The focus of Venture Track was to design and build functional prototype games with the intent to market them. I was the Development Director on three of those projects, who's company names are listed above. The requirements of the course were much less then they were for capstone. Team sizes were smaller and the project durations were shorter than capstone as well. To that end, all three teams elected to follow a more traditional process management style.
Creating a 1000ft schedule for each of these projects was rather simple. It was fundamentally structured around the Venture Track class and presentation schedules. Each team met weekly to determine goals and tasks for the next week. I took the most important ones and compiled them into a simple overview that I then sent to the instructors.
We decided on using Trello for our process management software. It was free and its interface was very user friendly. Compared to the database structure of Hansoft, Trello was much more appealing. Each company had its own business organization in Trello. The main problem with Trello was in regards to data tracking, at least in the free version. Each day I did a sort of daily scrum where I went over the boards to see what tasks had been updated. Then I could follow up with the developers on the statuses of those tasks. After doing so, I sent out a Daily Progress Spreadsheet so that the whole team could see where we were at a glance.
Trello is a live service and has been undergoing regular maintenance and periodic updates. When we started using Trello there was no ability to view all cards by due date. The default viewing option was to view cards by board, which caused some higher priority cards to be overlooked. To rectify that, I used the Trello API to construct a web application to pull tasks by date. The developer supplies a Trello application key which is then used to pull all of their personal trello cards. The cards are then sorted by due date and printed to the screen. The different colored postits are representative of the task's priority. Trello has since implemented the search by due date feature, but still does not filter out "Completed" Tasks. I am continuing to refine this application as time presents itself.
