Welcome everyone to the production blog for Adonai Invitational's sprint 5! With only 2 sprints left, our time together is rapidly coming to a close sadly. But we are not done yet and as always there is plenty to talk about, so lets talk briefly about team communication from a producers perspective.

   One of the worst things I can do as a producer is write a poorly worded card for someone, no matter what happens to that card I am responsible for its result. Part of the reason a well made backlog and Game Design Document are so important, is because when you are not there to watch over the developers shoulder they will do things in a way that makes sense to them. Sometimes this is excellent, because you cannot micromanage every aspect of your team, and you want team members to have a sense of creativity that they foster when building the game. However sometimes that creativity strays away from the dream that the designer lays down, and here lies the problem. Suddenly when you said "make a tent for a knight to live in when he is done fighting" it looks more like a home for a family of 4 because the developer read the words "live in" and just went with it.  The solution to this as a producer is to gauge what kind of guidance the developers need and facilitate that. Maybe they just need a quick example from a magazine or digital image search, maybe they need to be sat down with the GDD and have some reading time with the designer, maybe the designer needs to draw out some rough sketches on what should be going on for a menu layout. Whatever that person needs, you get them that thing (within reason).

   When work comes across your desk that clearly departs from what the designer has been approving before, maybe you need to stop and ask "Hey are we sure this is what we wanted?" or sometimes even "Is this fun for the player?". These questions could easily save people hours worth of work, and as we remember well time is money! Saving it is almost as important as earning it. It is also quite interesting to note that in Agile training the idea is not just to know who should get what work, but also knowing when there is work being assigned that does not need to exist. Never hand out fluff work, easy stuff is well and good, but work for the sake of looking busy is a bad plan.

 So long as you keep your team from wasting their precious time and ensure everyone knows what they are actually working on, you should progress at a steady pace. It is lastly worth remembering that sometimes people will be confused and yet will not volunteer this fact, do your best to reassure your team that you are always open and available should they have questions. That question they have could save you an entire week of waiting for a card that is completely wrong when it gets finished!

Now lets get down to the sprint itself! As you can see from the chart below, our team continues to work and is slowly, but surely, catching up the projected completion time. With our adjustments to the backlog completed, we also appear to be matching the average points completed this sprint. Our team has been doing a great job at dealing with the changes we have made to our backlog and I could not be prouder of the work they have managed to complete!

 So let us take a look at said work!

Programmer- Justin, Adam (and sometimes Tristin)

Justin spent a lot of this sprint redesigning the "Hit the reins" and speed elements for the player, this was in response to the feedback that players have been giving us. The rough part of this is that I cannot just slap up lines of code to show his work! Trust me when I say that those changes, and modifying the ground so players fell through it less often, really improved the quality of this game!

 

Adam a lot of his time working with the AI to improve it, he also created the functionality of our powerups and several UI components

Tristin will be appearing here is a bit odd, but this is to denote that he has been switched to a programmer for the remainder of the project so he can assist with issues like putting HORSE ANIMATIONS IN THE GAME! It is really exciting to see it live in the game itself and his work has brought a huge sense of pride to our team! (Turns out it is SO awesome that the gif doesnt render properly here! Play the game to see it all in motion!)

Horse Gif

Level Designers- Hudson and William

Hudson spent this sprint installing a freshly made 1 piece track for level one, along with placing textures into the level to give it more color.

William spent considerable time working on the very first version of our second level, it does not look like much now, but we had him get this together so people could test the track itself before the scenery was put up around it.

2D Art and Animation- Tamil and Daniel

Daniel worked on some really great animations for our horses and even got our chariot wheel spinning!

Tamil spend the time working on more UI elements for our game, so that we would have a really nice interface for the player to look at during the race

3D Modelers- Erika and sometimes also Tristin (when he is not programming)

Erika really set her awesome level up to 11 by creating a bunch of great assets for the second level in addition to the powerup icons for the players to collect

I know we talked about Tristin already, but seriously Moving horses guys. Hey also put the finishing touches on the archway that will server as the start/finish for our first level.

Well this wraps it all up in a nice and pretty bow! Tune in for the blog on sprint 6, so we can see the next version of level 2!