Project
The overall process of the project I consider very successful, we did this by reflecting well on our process and work, good task division and a general nice work mood that was stimulated by the playful interaction space. When we were stuck at a problem, we made sure that we had some playful products to release some steam. I did this by bringing my juggling equipment to the space, which appeared to be very successful. It really emptied your mind and made you fresh, to work on that hard problem again, that you now see as a challenge. In future projects I want to keep this playful element in the work flow.
At the beginning of the project, all tasks were shared such as: concept development, game design, research on target group etc. When it was clear what game we wanted to make, it was time to really divide the tasks. This project I wanted to learn how to program so I became the AI-programmer. This means that I was responsible for all the movement and “intelligence“ of the characters such as the Ferbs, Flyer, Biter and how they react on the objects and each other in the game: platforms, grass, cliffs etc. At first it took me almost a week for one simple interaction, but at the end of the project I could program around an interaction per hour. This caused a real spurt in the amount of interactions in the game and I was able to program all the must from our Moscow planning. In future project I would also like to have a clear tasks division, because it makes the productivity higher and the end result better.
For this project I wanted to become team leader and the project group agreed. My tasks as team leader weren’t so hard because there weren’t any problems in the team. The only thing I noticed was that everybody was too late to often. That’s why I introduced a point system. Every time when you arrive more than 15 minutes late, you will receive 1 point, if you have 4 points you have to buy a pie. The urge to be on time increased for the whole team and we also were more on time, but we have also eaten a lot of pie. The point system is a keeper for next projects.
In future projects I want to set a deadline well before the exhibition in order to leave enough time for user testing. This project the firrst real user tests were on the exhibitions days itself, this is something I want to avoid in the future. Also we could have taken more time in how our product would work on the market. For me this wasn’t very important, because I was already doing this in my own little project. These are the only 2 points that could have been done better, but overall I see this project as very successful.
