Producer Devlog 3

Hello everyone! 

Welcome back to Sprint 3. Overall this was a productive Sprint, we got a decent amount of work done in the end and managed to overcome some challenges that we faced. For this devlog I'd like to cover a bit more about my personal work that I do, and the issues that we came across.

Starting with my personal work, at the start of every day I pop into Jira and check my team's work. I first look at what is in to be verified, verify that content and ensure it is meeting our goal. If not, the work gets sent back and I let them know exactly what needs to be changed.  Then I check my other channels, starting with Blocked. If anything is in Blocked it's an immediate red flag because that means someone is stopped from doing their work, there is an issue disrupting the workflow. Usually there isn't anything in there, but in the instance that there is I'd reach out to them to discuss what the issue is and take the next steps to resolve it. After I'll take a look at our scope by looking at our remaining cards and the amount of time that is left. During that process I'll adjust the scope as needed to ensure that we can meet our deliverable.

Then the rest of the day consists of what is needed to be done, which can be a numerous amount of things so I'll go ahead and list them all! Throughout the sprint I have to ensure a consist team workflow, part of that is checking Jira, the other part is motivating my team and checking in with them. If someone is falling behind, I need to go and discuss with them why it's happening and how we can fix it. Along with sending out task reminders, I also set up needed team documents so that it's ready for them to input what is needed. 

I organize and lead team meetings. There are two different days for this, I might have discussed it previously in the first devlog so I won't expand much on that here. But, one of them is a mandatory day being every Saturday at 1:30 PM. I require everyone to show up and give me a check in on their work progress. During this time I provide any help that is needed, and have any discussions usually with our Game Designer Matt.  Lastly, there might be some other small things like updating burndown charts at the end of every sprint to track our sprint progress and overall goal. That's my main rotation of simplified work that I do as a Producer. 

Let's talk issues! There was one major issue we faced this Sprint and the one before, it was that there was not enough playtesting during the development process. From Sprint 1-3 we noticed a consistent issue with playtesting of our levels. This heavily relied on our level designer playtesting the levels after creating them. We found this issue through 1. playtesting it ourselves (Matt and I), and 2. feedback from playtesters. I am not entirely sure why this was a recurrent issue as I had tried my best to really reinforce the fact that playtesting is important especially when designing levels. Now I will say, there was improvement each Sprint on playtesting and we had less and less issues, but the problem was that they still existed. We were able to find many ways to break the level which should not be possible to do as easily, or that things just didn't feel right. So there definitely was improvements, but they weren't exactly what we needed. I was able to fix this issue by meeting up with both Designers a few times, discussing what the issues were and how to fix them. It is important to stress that when creating levels you have to try and break them, you need to feel the level. This will improve the development process, and provide a better player experience. 

That's all I have time to talk about for now, but thank you for coming along in this devlog! I may update this a little in the near future.

See you next time,

Angeleen.