Jack McLoughlin - Managing Sprints and Prototypes

Hi, this is Jack from Piano Virus. I want to share some of what our team has been up to over the last couple weeks! As we are Approaching the end of pre-production this week, I am going to go over what I have done to manage the team and get us ready for our alpha phase.

Sprint 1

Our pre-production phase included two sprints. As the project manager it is my job to make sure that everybody is staying busy and contributing to the best of their abilities. For this reason I decided to make sure our first sprint was light, I wanted to ease the team back into it after the break so It was just a lot of simple ideation and design work

I like to use kanban boards to organize sprints. I find them useful for tracking who is where. It also helps me see who is struggling with a workload. Overall the first sprint went great. everybody got their tasks done. My tasks were to rework our teams schedule and expand on the features that we came up with. The second task was actually great for two main reasons. First, It made it much easier to put together the schedule and second, it gave me a lot of guidance when putting together the tasks for the next sprint.

Sprint 2

Our second sprint is still in progress at the time of writing but for this one I wanted to introduce more collaborative tasks. The main goal of this sprint was to create a paper prototype to test our main game loop. I also wanted to make sure that our programming was basically done by the first week of alpha so I put multiple people on those tasks.

While the creation of the paper prototype was a group effort, the initial design was my task.  I decided to create a sort of card game with trends and planets. 

After a meeting to discuss this prototype as well as brainstorm some minigame ideas, we created this

Our prototype is now in the final stages of creation by the rest of our team while I now set my sights on some more scheduling. Our current schedule looks like this,

but I intend to shift us over to a proper project organization software for alpha. Currently I am looking into ClickUp for our team ClickUp seems like a perfect software for us. Its free version is quite powerful and it will allow for a much more organized management approach than Miro does right now. After spending some time with the software I am fully confident I can make use of it for our project going forward.

Next Steps

Tomorrow, our team will be entering our Alpha phase. This means the next few sprints will consist of getting all the pieces of our game in the engine and functional. Before that though, we need to do some testing with our paper prototype. We hope that the data from that will help us to create a stronger product. We will use this data to create an Alpha Phase roadmap to outline our goals and methods.