Making a Game While Discovering the Scrum Methodology
Over the summer of 2015 I came up with a devious plan — convince UAA to let me design and program a game during the fall semester as one of my courses. And they went for it…
…with one “small” compromise — since the professor overseeing this independent studies course also teaches project management, I had to agree to use Scrum as I built the game. I agreed, but honestly, it’s kind of freaking me out as time to start gets closer. Because while I make notes about what I’m going to do, as a 1-man shop I simply don’t document every little thing.
However, in order to have the fun stuff I need to do the unknown stuff — and while nervous about it, I’m hoping it actually makes sense for what I do and gives me a great tool for future game development.
I’m going to keep a log here of my experiences learning Scrum for game development during the 2015 fall semester at UAA. Feel free to ask questions or comment on the entries here.
Back to a single sprint this week and just three user stories: Import word code from Endless Speller game and hook it up. If hero is up against an enemy, he needs to do automatic melee attacks. QA this sprint. Number 2 in the list was finished, although it resulted in a big chunk of […]
(I started numbering incorrectly at the beginning so this is how I’m fixing that — skipping a log titled week 10. There’s still a log for each week, but a log titled Week 10 doesn’t exist. Yeah, would have been good if I’d fixed this at week 2 or 3…) This last week I tried […]
This last week I worked on three user stories during the sprint: Create a task list of handling combat between PC and NPC. Using that task list, write the combat code. Create a progress report for the project. The first user story was created at the suggestion of Dr Banks since I was having a […]
This last week I worked on only one user story: I need to keep track of the inventory items that are picked up in the dungeon. That was completed with the addition of a new Inventory.cs module that keeps track of gold collected as well as spell books collected and used. I’m also treating health […]
This last week was very close to awesome. I ended up getting a ton of stuff working after fixing the movement code that was kicking my butt last week. At this point you can move the hero around the dungeon and when he bumps up against crates and barrels he can smack them with his […]
More of the same in this sixth week — while progress is being made, it’s going more slowly than I hoped. This last week most of my time was spent rewriting the movement code from Javascript to C# so it could be used more easily in the game (the original came with the tiling tool). […]
The fifth week of the project turned into a continuation of last week — I’ve run into a technical problem that’s completely blocking me. Instead of starting a new sprint I took the last week to complete the stories from the last week that didn’t get complete as well as started researching ways past the […]
This fourth week of the project was one of those weeks where I’d like a “do-over.” Due to being sick several days combined doing a poor job of estimating how long things would take, I didn’t complete nearly as much as I planned. User Stories For This Sprint #1 Spawn minions at specified points in […]
This third week of the project had me working on my second sprint — three user stories that were chosen during class time. User Stories For This Sprint #1 Create a dungeon that can be used for testing. Using tiled sprites I created a dungeon with 3 rooms, hallways, and a large open area. This […]
This second week of the project had me working on my first sprint — three user stories that were chosen during class time. User Stories Completed in this Sprint #1 Finish the game design document (GDD). This was completed, although the GDD is kind of a dynamic entity, so it will change as the project […]
This first week of the project was mainly spent getting up to speed with the basics of Scrum, using some information found online via Google, but mainly from the book “Agile Game Development with Scrum” (Addison Wesley) by Clinton Keith. My assignment was to come up with at least 10 user stories. I created the […]
Okay, 11 weeks into the 16-week semester and I haven’t posted anything. Chalk it up to “eyes are bigger than my stomach” syndrome (although if you’ve seen my stomach, you’ll wonder how my eyes could possibly be THAT big). However, as part of the class I’ve been turning in a “log report” every week and […]
Due to reasons that I’ve discussed elsewhere, I’ve almost completely switched from Corona SDK to using Unity. I love Corona so the decision was *not* an easy one to make. But I’ll be using Unity for this upcoming game and while the first course I create for Unity used Javascript (Unityscript, actually) for the code […]
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