Week Two, Going Strong

Week two is just about over, and the project is going well. A couple set backs with outsourcing, but we made a little headway. Thursday was our planned meeting day with Triston's friend regarding some outsourced sound, but due to the extreme nature of parking on campus during a football game, we had to reschedule. We also ran into some issues with getting sound into our game using Moai. According to the engineers, it requires a decent amount of legwork to get operational. Even if we don't get sound into the prototype, we could always show a video of the prototype and just add sound in video post-production. Another team is also working on sound, and we're hoping to combine our collective knowledge and maybe cobble something together.

In regards to outsourcing, I've found the Creative Commons license to be an excellent resource, especially for a prototype. The Creative Commons website is easy to use and gets the user a license in a few minutes. The license is easily configurable and allows for a decent amount of customization. We will be looking into some concept art outsourcing this week, but that will be through the University. Unfortunately, Labor Day is setting that back a bit, but our team is meeting Tuesday to do some work anyway, which will be a great opportunity to figure out the art outsourcing.

By Tuesday the team should have a pretty decent working prototype. It does look like programmer art and white boxes will be the de facto aesthetic for our prototype. We're okay with that though. It is a prototype, and we don't have an artist easily accessible. That should complete the first sprint in our scrum, which I created last week. The second sprint is mostly user interface, and if our estimates are correct, we should have a little extra time to tidy things up and maybe add a start screen (or work on sound).

To get started with the scrum process I used a spreadsheet in Google docs. Mostly it was creating user stories and sprints, and putting that information into a visually discernible format. It was also pretty easy to create a burndown chart. Although with a 2-3 week project a burndown chart feels a bit overkill. It was good for the practice though, and it can't hurt the project. Overall, I think the scrum documentation turned out well, and next week we will actually get into using it to assign work.

Going into the last full week of work (and being halfway done), I'm feeling good about the project. Everything is on schedule and the engineers are getting even better with Lua and the Moai engine.