Team Management (Josh D.)

Team Communication

With our team only being on campus two days a week we need a way to stay up-to-date and be able to communicate with one another outside of university hours. This was when we set up a discord channel with various sub-channels to allow us to stay informed with one another and ask for help when it was needed. For instance, in our programming channel, we would post regular progression updates so the team was always kept in the loop. This also helped when gaining feedback from the team outside of scrum meetings.

The reason I mention scrum meetings is that we introduced the agile workflow within our group to help manage workloads throughout the team. This was managed by having weekly meetings within our discord as well as feedback sessions with tutors and peers on Thursday which allowed us to have weekly playtesting sessions to see what needed increment upon.

We also used Miro to help with product and sprint backlogs as it allowed each member of the team to choose a task to work on within that week depending on its priority. This allowed the group to have a visual understanding of what needed to be done before every group meeting.

Final Week Push

Within our team, we were able to create a timetable for the final week to help visualise all the final tasks needing to be done for hand in. We wanted to be less strict with these deadlines to not put too much pressure on the team. With this said, I feel like the team had made extremely steady progress along the final week adding polish across each section bringing it to life.

Project File Management

With this being our first project in Unreal Engine as a team we wanted to have an easy way to transfer files across to one another. This was when our tutor introduced us to source control (GitHub). By using GitHub it meant we weren't restricted as a team as many users could be working on the same project at the same time as long as they were not working on the same file as this would cause conflict when uploading it to GitHub.

Nevertheless, it would be a lie if I said we didn't run into conflict when unloading files to GitHub as even with our 'Check-In-Check-Out' channel it was extremely hard for others and even myself to not make slightly small changes in main mechanics when working in other mechanics like the weapons, magic, or even level design. However, this was an easy solution to fix as we had great communication skills and was willing to help one another catch up if anyone's files had to be overwritten.