Producer Devlog 1

Hello everyone! Welcome to the Producer's point of view for KickBack's first Sprint! My name is Angeleen Arellano, and I lead the team for our game. 

I've been a Producer for all of my other classes and have taken Project Management classes on the side to better help with my ability to lead a team, and manage people. I truly find this process exhilarating and love being apart of a development team where I can help guide everyone to a finished deliverable. In this devlog I will be walking you through how the first Sprint went, what I did, what my team did, and how the future is looking for us.

The process of getting the team together was interesting and new to me, everyone essentially went through a hiring process. Game Designers pitched their game ideas, then our Professors went and picked 4 Game Designers and 4 Producers. I was luckily put with Matthew (Matt) Gai, who I've worked with previously on another project called Zonk. The Game Designers and Producers then had to sit in a room together and everyone picked their team members through what I will call a hiring system. It was pretty fun but definitely took a while to do.

After our team was picked, I worked on setting up a bunch of stuff needed for our team to be prepared. One of the things was ensuring we had a backlog ready in Jira for Sprint 1. Though in order to do this I had to meet with Matt several times to ensure I understood the vision of the game. I had him fill out a GDD and ALR to his best extent at that moment, which throughout the Sprint he continued to iterate. Let's fast forward a bit, the start of that sprint was a little rough due to not having a full vision set in stone, but I managed to get a somewhat decent amount of cards in, here's what a section of that looked like: 

It's a little hard to look at past Sprints on Jira, but in total there was 74 cards assigned. Half of those were completed (I'm currently writing this in Sprint 2, we are doing way better! Look forward to that :), every team also unfortunately had a late start, so not a lot of things were completed. 

Throughout the rest of the Sprint I continued to write cards, meet with my team, improved on methods to keep them motivated and have better time management, and ensured that I was helping guide them the process, while also providing a place of comfort. As important as it is to make sure we are staying in Agile Development, it is also important to make sure my team is in a happy work environment.

Next I'd like to highlight some of the work that my team did, a few of these stood out to Matt and I, I'll go ahead and explain! Starting off with Angie, our 2D Artist. She made some concept art for the world, giving us part of a theme board to help with creation of the vision. She provided a few pieces but this is the one I'd like to share:

She included all of our POI's, the Sunken City (on the left), the Shipping Yard (on the right), and the Lighthouse (on the top middle). Angie managed to grasp a really good vibe and aesthetic for how we want the game to feel and look. Then she created some concept art for our enemies: 

This is Enemy #1, our flying enemy. Both of our robots have a theme of looking innocent and happy, but in reality they want to fight you! This one shoots a cannon-like lighting attack at the Player. Next is Enemy #2: 

This is the ground enemy, following with the appearance, it's attacks are like a mini machine gun, firing in short bursts. Overall Angie really managed to grasp the vision we wanted for our enemies, and game. Really great work from her!

Next I'd like to highlight one of our Animators, Keana. She worked on the art and rigging for both legs of the character. I will show both images in a row, but for a quick explanation: The left leg is the Player's gun leg, it can be interchanged but they start off with a shotgun. The right left is the Player's pogo leg, this stays the same throughout the entirety of the game. Here's how both of those look:

Next we got some amazing models from all of our Modelers, since I don't want to make this devlog too long so I'll proceed to show the modeled enemies from Ciela, in the same order as the previous concept art was shown. Overall our modelers really impressed us, and I feel it's only bringing us a few steps closer to our final deliverable! Here is Ciela's work:

To finish this devlog off, I'd like to say even though everyone had a bit of a slow and rough start, my team still managed to pull through and make some amazing products. All of this was essential to getting our game started off strong, and I'm truly impressed and proud of their work. As I said earlier, I am currently writing this in Sprint 2, and I have to say that my team is awesome. Through the rough bumps they've pulled through and shown me some of their best work. I'm excited to see how the future Sprints go.

Thank you for taking the time to read this, and I'll see you in the next devlog,

Angeleen Arellano.