Meeting Log
Technical Summary:
During this project, we created a meeting log that we would fill out every day, showing who attended the meeting, what had previously been accomplished, what we would work towards for the day, and anything that would get in our way. This was all done inside a live Word document, where we would date every meeting as discussed the plan for the day. We chose this format to conduct our meetings because it was more convenient for us all to access and understand what someone was doing, which could be beneficial to anyone joining us later in the day, or working from home. With our meetings, we would typically focus on one area of development that we would follow through the whole day, which if we completed we would move on to something else. We typically would start something and complete it within the same day, but we did on occasions have specific elements that were carried over to the next because of how large the task was.
During Beta, we did adopt a more sprint meeting style, following with the development of the Market and the Cantina, both being tackled all together across a whole week, rather than one person and us all doing individual tasks. This definitely had the benefit of getting through one task faster, but did also mean that we were focusing so much on one area that the rest of the game was getting neglected and started building the to-do list up the more time we spent on these areas.
By the point of Gold, we were less focusing on several different aspects and really wanting to polish the areas that deserved the enhancements. We reverted to the process of Alpha where we all did our own separate pieces for the game. We also put less focus on this document, hoping straight into developing and improving the game, we did discuss improvements and additions, but didn't document them very much.
Reflection:
As much as this helped us understand what we were working towards, I don't think we used it to the best of our abilities. We didn't document every day of production, whether that was in our outside of college, so we have noticeable gaps throughout the document. I think this document would have worked better to have every single accomplishment from when something started to when it was completed, having it as a way to celebrate the progress we've made throughout the project. I personally believe that the process of developing our own individual parts for the game worked better, allowing us all to focus on what we needed to accomplish ourselves, rather than collaborating on one whole area that would slow down the development of other areas.