Project Two, Weeks 1 and 2 get!

Weeks one and two went by pretty quickly for our next project. So, getting down to business, our team is:

• Myself - producer
• Alice Owens - artist
• Jason Thummel - engineer
• Jason Kanagaratnam - engineer

We are part of the 3 groups that were chosen to work on the educational games (as opposed to the TreadPort physical therapy games). Oddly enough, we actually chose a physical therapy game to work on! Stacy Bamberg is a professor on campus working in the bioengineering department on a few projects involving physical therapy for stroke victims. Out of the two presented projects, my team and I decided on the Kinect game for arm range of movement therapy. Initially, we were going back and forth from this to the thermodynamics game presented by another professor, but we eventually decided on this due to the excitement of working with Kinect.

Quite honestly, I pushed fairly hard for the Kinect game as I recently had a close family member suffer through a stroke and the rehabilitation required afterwards. I just thought how great it would be do to something to help people through that process. Seeing it first hand really showed how difficult it is to stay motivated and to keep watch on the patient's progress. Progress is slow, and having a visual way to display to the patient/player the improvement he/she is making and an engaging method of encouraging therapy could be so important to the well-being of the patient. To be a little selfish, the family member who suffered a stroke has done so much for me growing up that I couldn't help but jump at the chance to give back to him in a meaningful way. On the other hand, I thought it would be interesting, and motivating, to be personally invested in a project like this.

The team went through myriad design ideas before we came to our current gardening concept. Since a somewhat simple game had already been developed for this, we at first thought of ways to basically skin the same concept with things like bingo, mazes, or word-finds. That just seemed too simple and too boring still. That's when we came up with the idea of some sort of consistent narrative arc, albeit simple, tying the separate levels together. For me, gardening immediately sprang to mind. There are many stages of gardening, from tilling the soil to harvesting your fruits, that we could design multiple stages easily. Combined with a sort of narrative (watching your garden grow) that keeps the player engaged from level to level, we hoped to engage the player with the outdoors aesthetic as well. Since most physical therapy is done indoors in sterile environments, we hope that this aesthetic allows the player to escape the sterile hallway if even just a little.

From there we hammered out some details, involving figuring out how to perform the actions with the Kinect, what levels to use, how to work in breaks, and how to bring players back to do more physical therapy. I made a short video of our initial pitch (unfortunately with no audio) that should give a basic understanding of our original concept.

From here we got to work immediately, scrumming out our project and deciding on what to prototype and what to leave out. Below is a thumbnail showing the basic layout of our task pane for our scrum. Click on the picture to actually check out the scrum, and be sure to check out the different tabs at the bottom!

As we moved past pre-production and entered into our first week of working on the game itself, things have been coming together quite nicely. The engineers have been working hard pair programming. At first I thought this would create some issues with scheduling tasks and estimating hours, but it has actually gone quite smoothly. They've been churning out excellent work, and since both of our engineers have been working together, there hasn't been any conflict regarding duplicate work or people waiting on prerequisite features to be completed. Our artist Alice has really embraced the scrum process and has been super productive. As for me, I've been scrambling to keep up with their work flow a bit, and trying to learn a little about audio so we can add sound effects and background music. This seems relatively simple to code in XNA, but my utter lack of sound design knowledge might hold me back a bit. I'm going to keep trying to get that done, and we may actually get to add some more features into our prototype given our rate of completion. Our estimates may have been too high. That's not a problem though (or should I say if you're going to have a problem, this is the best kind to have) as we'll just add some of the features we took out and use that time to polish the levels. Things are looking promising, and by next week we should have a mostly complete prototype.

Pitch and Postmortem (with video!)

We wrapped up this week with, what we felt, was a successful pitch. Monday's pitch felt a little flat, so we went and improved on a few of its deficits over the next couple days. In the end, our game showed much better in prototype then it did during the initial pitch, which is something I need to work on (more on that below). However, without further ado, here is the trailer I cut together for our game:

Afterwards we held a postmortem to ascertain where we ended up. Here's how our timeline ended up:

It takes a fairly obvious shape (almost a sine wave) when you think about it: hitting a few lows before achieving a decent number of highs. It also turns out I learned a few things talking about the project. Something I thought we did very well with (and the rest of the team agreed) was our design meetings. Design needs to be done quick in this format, but we all felt that we were able to be flexible, compromise, and combine our respective ideas in something that was tailored to the client. No one felt like they were slighted by design decisions or left out of the loop. Our Facebook group probably went a long way in helping communication, especially early on when we weren't sure who had texting or a chat client.

After the design highs we hit a few lows. Looking back, we all severely underestimated the difficulty of the project. Initially, we felt that, at tops, a week would be needed to get the basic prototype together. However, the engineers felt flustered by the lack of documentation for Moai, and it took a week just to get ducks in a row. Something to look at in the future would be to schedule smaller tasks the first week so as to allow the engineers to grow accustomed to the engine and learn some basics while churning out a few easier tasks. This might allow us to prioritize a little better as well. Tasks we thought would take a few hours ended up taking a couple days, so knowing what those are and tackling them early would save some stress later on. As a producer, I definitely need to attack issues with art outsourcing (or sound outsourcing) earlier. It seemed like I would have plenty of time to get some things done, but there were always unexpected road blocks. It turned out alright this time, but next time it might not, and having a few extra days to get things in order might make all the difference.

Towards the end, everything came together. We got things we needed done as the engineers worked with a better understanding of the engine, and art finally came together thanks to Sagar. I made an initial pitch that swung far too plain on the pendulum, but came back pretty well (with the help of the team) for the final pitch on Wednesday. We got a playable demo working, on both pc and iOS. Once we got a firm grasp on the project the last week, while hectic, was much better planned out. In the future, I'll be looking to get that mountain climbed a little earlier. Crunch time isn't fun for anyone.

The last thing I'll say is that I'm sorry to see the team break up. As a first experience, I don't think I could have asked for a better team than Sagar, Triston, and Yuntao. All of them are very capable engineers and good designers. At least now I'll have some engineers to ask for second opinions (and maybe snag some artwork from Sagar if I need to).

Week 3: Setbacks and Hitting Goals

We started week 3 off a little behind. Unfortunately, engineering hitting a couple snags over the long weekend and we didn't quite hit our projections. I went in and reworked the upcoming week's sprint, accounting for extra tasks and re-configuring estimates. We did have to drop a few things into the backlog, but they were all window dressing and not any core gameplay functionality.

As the week went a long, we picked up steam, knocking out tasks fairly quickly. The holiday threw us off a bit as well, but we made up for it by meeting on Tuesday and Thursday for the afternoon. At the end of the week, we had a working prototype that met or exceeded our expectations and didn't drop too much functionality.

Art has been somewhat of an issue. Originally we were looking to outsource to a friend of Triston, but after discussing the ramifications of that we decided to stay in-house. However, by the time I reached Mark to discuss in-house outsourcing, he was in China for a week or so with no internet access. I spoke with Roger, and he passed along an email to his undergrads. As of now, we may be able to grab a couple pieces of concept art from an undergrad I've been in talks with, but given the short notice, understandably, I'm not expecting him to be able to produce anything. We did manage to get a couple pieces of customer art together thanks to Sagar, and it seems that those will be plenty sufficient if all else fails.

With time running out, our team managed to keep cool, get the work done, and turn out a quality prototype in the face of a few setbacks. The team did great, and if everything goes according to plan, our work should reflect this. Pitches are this week, and we have a fair understanding of what's expected. Hopefully all goes well and we can actually produce a fully realized game.

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.