This week, due to other commitments, I only spent around 70% of the time I usually do on all course activities including the team project. As a result, I wasn’t able to make as much progress as I had hoped for.
Activities
(19/07/2021 – 20/07/2021)
- Writing last week’s blog post and retrospective – catching up after being absent throughout the weekend.
(21/07/2021)
- Working through the Intellectual Property material on Canvas.
- I did find the videos on English law useful – and now realise that legislature related to Intellectual property may come either from the UK Parliament statutes, or from precedent established in Common Law (Scott 2021).
- It is important to point out that Scots law and English law are considerably different. However, the Intellectual Property Office remains responsible for IP rights in the UK inclusing Scotland (The Scottish Government 2020).
- After doing some additional research artound the topic, I found out that Scotland plans to remain in sync with EU regulations after Brexit, for the foreseeable future, even if it means diverging from English regulations (BBC 2020).
- I managed to make a start on my task creating sound ambience for the various rooms in the game.
- There are plenty of Public Domain room tones uploaded to Freesound.org, which can be layered and equalised to produce the specific ambience we need (Freesound 2021).
Team meeting
(22/07/2021)
We kicked off our weekly session with the supervisor meeting.
I shared my last week’s concerns with Matty about the extent of my in-engine contributions to the project.
Matty’s advice was to try to eliminate blockers and see whether there was anything I could hand over to other members of the team.
Sprint review
Paul reassured me that my contribution to the team with regards to organisation is seen as invaluable.
Elliot presented his UI concept and we had a brief discussion about it. The concept involves using post-it notes to communicate tasks – which works very well with the dementia theme. I asked whether that would be something diegetic – in the game world – or as part of the UI, and questioned whether creating post-its of the right size would make sense in the world. Do we even need them to communicate the current goal?
It turns out that the script that Elliot wrote already includes plenty of information to guide the player by using Elizabeth’s monologue. I proposed that perhaps making sure that we display subtitles, and provide a log of the most recent dialogue, could be enough to guide players.
Sprint retrospective
Nothing too notable to write about – it was good to look back at the last sprint in terms of what went well, what went wrong, and what we were hoping to improve.
I copied my last improvement idea – increasing my involvement with the code – to this week as well, since it still applies.
Sprint planning
This week, since the deadline is fast approaching, I proposed that we take a step back and take a look at our project roadmap on Confluence, and try to plan out our remaining weeks, with consideration for tasks that haven’t been started yet – such as playtesting and recording dialogue.
For the following sprint, considering our progress so far, I asked that we try and aim for a furnished, textured house that that a player could simply walk around in and explore. Combined with my audio work and James’ post-processing work, we should be able to bring a feeling of a real place to the game world.
Make a house a home.
Common expression, and the sprint 5 goal as framed by Elliot.
(23/07/2021)
I had a read through Paul’s blog post in which he compared the operation of our team with that of a high-performing team (Cheesman 2021).
After our last retrospective, it was more apparent than ever that as a team, we’ve began “norming”, comfortably following the structure afforded by our weekly meetings, Jira issue tracking, and collaboration using Miro, Discord and Confluence. It appears then that we are well on our way to the “performing” stage as defined by Tuckman (1965).
However, as far as the “High performing team” ideal by Katzenbach and Smith is concerned, I would still like to see more evidence for our commitment to common goals and mutual accountability (Katzenbach and Smith 2015). At the start of the module, I prepared a checklist based on the book and posted it on Confluence – it would be beneficial, as a team, to go through it, and see if we can find evidence to support each item.
References
BBC. 2020. “MSPs Pass Brexit Bill to ‘Keep Pace’ with EU Laws.” BBC News, 22 Dec [online]. Available at: https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/uk-scotland-scotland-politics-55396311 [accessed 23 Jul 2021].
CHEESMAN, Paul. 2021. “Week 7 Module 3 Critical Reflection.” Leveling up [online]. Available at: https://levelingupdotblog.wordpress.com/2021/07/22/week-7-module-3-critical-reflection/ [accessed 24 Jul 2021].
FREESOUND. 2021. “Freesound – Sound Search.” freesound.org [online]. Available at: https://freesound.org/search/?g=1&q=room%20tone&f=%20license:%22Creative+Commons+0%22&s=None&cluster_id= [accessed 23 Jul 2021].
KATZENBACH, Jon R and Douglas K SMITH. 2015. The Wisdom of Teams : Creating the High-Performance Organization. Boston: Harvard Business Review Press.
SCOTT, Michael. 2021. “Intellectual Property Law.” flex.falmouth.ac.uk [online]. Available at: https://flex.falmouth.ac.uk/courses/913/pages/week-8-intellectual-property?module_item_id=54502 [accessed 23 Jul 2021].
THE SCOTTISH GOVERNMENT. 2020. “Intellectual Property – Mygov.scot.” http://www.mygov.scot [online]. Available at: https://www.mygov.scot/intellectual-property [accessed 23 Jul 2021].
TUCKMAN, Bruce W. 1965. “Developmental Sequence in Small Groups.” Psychological Bulletin 63(6), 384–99.
Cover image
BOSCARO, Giammarco. 2017. Unsplash.com. Available at: https://unsplash.com/photos/zeH-ljawHtg [accessed 23 Aug 2021].
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