Project Management and Group Cooperation
This blog post will contain all information about my individual and group project management for this project. This includes things like our forms of communication, meetings, work share, weekly to do lists and any problems we encountered during this group project.Team Discord Server
As a group, our main form of communication was over a platform called Discord. This platform allowed us to create a private server, where we could make a variety of different channels to share relevant information and keep things we needed to sent to each other organised so they would be easy to access and find. We also would use this server to host weekly meetings, where we could call and interact with each other over voice and video calls to share information and discuss things to do with our game and work. We separated everything into relevant channels to keep our work organised.
As we progressed further into this project, our team become less and less responsive (This will be discussed in more detail later on). and it made planning and organising work much harder. We reached a point where only Louie, Katie and I would talk often and use the discord server, so we made a private channel just for the three of us to use instead as nobody else in our group wanted to interact or contribute to our project. In these channels, we shared information constantly and would host meetings between the three of us whenever we felt like we needed one.
We also gave each other roles on discord, to tag us as what our respective rolls would be for this project. However, as we went along a lot of our roles changed due to people in our group not forfilling their jobs. In the end, our roles were shared as:
Katie: Director, Script Writer and Coder
Louie: UI Artist and Coder
Me: Character Concept Artist, Sprite Artist and Coder
Edward: Backgrounds
Our roles can be seen as the tag at underneath our bios on discord.
Team Meetings
Our team meetings were hosted via discord in our Voice Channel. We usually organised a meeting every time that felt fitting, and would agree on a time that worked best for everyone. We didn't have meetings weekly, but we had them regularly still. We would usually discuss our work in class and make sure we were all caught up with what we were doing during lessons, but we still had meetings out of class too to discuss anything we felt we needed too.
Below is a small selection of screenshots of us organising meetings, the dates can be seen next to the messages sent.
Team OneDrive
We also set up a team OneDrive, to make it a lot more convenient to organise and share files amongst ourselves. Originally we were sharing things through discord, but the quality gets compressed a lot and sharing files is much harder. So we thought that setting a OneDrive up together would be the best way to transfer work between each other. We also organised our files to make everything easy to find and download.
Distributing Work
Originally, our group had 6 members which allowed us to share our work our well and make the workload manageable for us all. However, as time went on people in our group stopped responding and participating in our work or coming into lessons. This was really frustrating, as it meant that we constantly had to keep re-distributing the work between the active members of our group. We had one member drop out without telling us and just stopped responding, another left to work on something else without warning too and another stopped coming into lessons and responding when we asked for updates. Even though this happened, we continued to share the leftover unfinished work out between the active members. We also constantly had meetings with our Tutor about this, so they were aware of our situation and we were given lots of advice on how to manage and cope. We ended up changing our game a lot to help balance the bigger workload with a now smaller group. We changed our game and plans a lot to help us manage everything better, for example we removed characters from our game, revised our script and made it shorter, and also completed a lot of written and legal document work together to make the process faster.
Constantly, Katie Louie and I would share work amongst each other, and ask for help from one another when needed. We would consistently explain if we had any problems or wanted to call to work on things together, or needed something from one another. We also distributed whatever work we needed completed at the time amongst each other.
Evidence of us communicating and helping one another throughout our game development and coding phase.
Class Work
As well as the work we completed outside of class, we would also work throughout lessons together.
We also had meetings with out tutor in class a lot to discuss our concerns and worries for the project. As we had had a lot of issues with members of our team, we felt really behind and were worried it would take an impact on our grades. Because of this, we arranged a few meetings with our tutor to discuss things and we were given some good advice on how to plan around this, and also a checklist of things we needed to complete to get passing grades. We were also told that we didn't have to finish our game and that we shouldn't panic over it, but we were really determined to create a finished project we were happy with and didn't want to be the only group who didn't just due to some issues we had.
Weekly To Do Lists
Individually, I also worked on weekly to do lists and kept a checklist of the different things we completed as a group throughout each week. This is our weekly list of what we completed each week in class on our blog work, and also as a group during our game development phases.
Week 1 - Introduction to the Module + Visual Novel Studies
Week 2 - Reviewing Visual Novels, Organising our Studio
Week 3 - Game Ideation/Game Jam session
Week 4 - Organising our Presentation
Week 5 - Doing our Pitch Presentation
Week 6 - Blog work
Week 7 - Target audience and Marketing
Week 8 - Diversity and Games Market Studies
Week 9 - Role Models in the Industry
Week 10 - Contract agreements
Week 11 - CAREERS WEEK
Week 12 - SMART targets and Meeting
Week 13 - IP Law
Week 14 - Design Rights
Week 15 - Asset development Workshop
Week 16 - Quality Assurance (Alpha testing)
Week 17 - Formative prep
Week 18 - Research, Meetings and Beta Testing
Week 19 - Finalising Script
Week 20 - INDUSTRY WEEK
Week 21-25 - Developing and Finishing our game
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