Producer Blog 4

Hello, reader! 

Welcome back to my blog. If you’re new to our Dev Logs, I’m Nolan, the producer of the Chico State student project Gobby’s Farm! We’re now over halfway through the production of Gobby’s Farm and I’m extremely happy with the state of our game. Every sprint has been more productive than the last, and our team is really seeing the vision. This is thanks to the great leadership of our lead designer Kaeli and the fantastic skills of each of our developers. Now, let’s dive into our Sprint 4 statistics and the amazing work completed by the team. 

I assigned 140 points during this sprint of which exactly 100 were moved in to verify and complete. AWESOME! That's over 120% from last sprint. That boosted our velocity to an average of 81.5 points per sprint, which projects us to finish our work by sprint 6 so we can focus sprint 7 on squashing bugs and refining whatever else needs improvement. Great work team!

This boost in productivity has a few antecedents. Spring break landed directly in the middle of sprint 4, giving our developers an extra week to work if they wanted to, and many did which was great! Also, build 2 was due right after spring break, so we had another sleepless night building the game for our professors and playtesters to try out and give feedback. To see the feedback we received, read Kaeli’s designer blog 4. Big shoutout to our programmers Carlos and Tommy for getting no sleep that night all in honor of Gobby, we couldn't do it without them.

This sprint consisted of rigging, animation, more models, UI, and lots of programming. Starting with our modelers, they made lots of props to fill the world as well and a large wizards tower for area 4. They’ve been doing a great job of texturing the props to match the overall whimsical theme of the world. The tower is a new addition to our scope as it used to be a massive tree with platformable branches, but we decided it would be better to make it a tower. We also got gobby’s arms rigged and animated to move depending on what action the player is performing. Regarding programming, we finished another enemy, got the menu’s completed, and worked a lot on the inventory. 

Sprint 4 wasn’t perfect, though. After getting lots of good feedback on our build, we made the tough decision that we’d have to redo our entire level and map. The game just wasn’t up to par with what our designer imagined. It didn’t give the vibe of being a beautiful wizard’s garden with fresh produce for the picking. On top of this, there was too much platforming and mazes which is not at all what our game was going for. From a producer's perspective, this was caused by us leads being too forgiving when our developers give suggestions or take too much creative freedom. Feedback is valued, of course, but I think there’s a line the designer has to keep in mind when they take advice from the team and verify work. Luckily, we have time for this change and I think it’s going to set our game back on the right track to living up to our visions

Menus

old layout, too many mazes!

This was a great sprint. We got a lot done and also got some great feedback at the perfect time to get our game complete on time. Again I’d like to thank my team for being locked in and doing amazing work. Thanks to you as well for reading and following along on Gobby’s journey!