Sanctum Infernum - Week 4

This blog post has been adjusted as part of a resubmission assignment.

Hello everybody and welcome back to the blog for my still currently unnamed project that I am working on. It is week 4 and while people were quite active around the team, I was busy working on a resubmission for another project and struggled to balance between this and that. That doesn't mean there's nothing I can talk about however.

Leads meeting

Due to various circumstances, most leads were not able to attend this meeting so it was cancelled for this week.

Department meeting

The designers are still trying to figure things out for the rest of the game in terms of enemies, story, mechanics and such. So while some of their ideas were shared around, I'm not sure if much was actually gained for us programmers to really get a grasp of. One of the programmers was a little ill at this point so he didn't have much to show yet for this meeting.

In the programming team

For this week, I did not assign myself any tasks on Jira, opting to take a much more managerial role for this sprint in which I would supervise my department and make sure to help where I could, rather than doing tasks directly. This is in response primarily to my struggle with balancing working on this project and my resubmission project.

Here is what I assigned Programmer A this week:

Here's what I assigned Programmer B this week:

With Programmer A handling the task of making the DDR aspect of our turn-based system, Programmer B would work on the turn-based system itself. This then left me with my resubmission to work on, which I did, though before I did that, I left Programmer B with a small checklist of some things I wanted from the turn-based combat system inside of a Google Doc (though in hindsight I should have put this on Jira formally), I'll leave some screenshots below of it.

I'm not sure if I mentioned it in some of the last few weeks posts, but last week a mechanic was decided that coincided with the DDR. The gist of it is that DDR based attacks would be activated using pages the player would collect around the map, and that they could also opt to use a regular attack based on a weapon they have equipped. That's what these notes are referring to with pages.

Throughout the week I would try to do what I could to help both Programmers A and B with their tasks, my involvement in them was small but I made sure that they had resources that could help them, such as the source code to some of my older games which include my own original implementation of both systems they're trying to create this week.

By the end of the week, both the programmers had finished their work and shown it to me, and I was ultimately left with mixed feelings. The DDR from Programmer A was showing a lot of promise and seemed to work fairly well. I considered it complete besides maybe some polish as an assignment for next week.

On the other hand, the turn-based system that Programmer B was working on didn't work by the end of the sprint and also was lacking in a lot of features I had mentioned in my checklist. I don't think I can put all of the blame on him though as I had found out afterwards that he was doing the same resubmission that I was. Meaning that this was also error of judgement on my part that I didn't consider if he was doing them. For that reason, I decided that I will try and avoid this issue by coming back and taking over this task again from next week, in order to properly create it in my original vision and give Programmer B something a little lighter.

Reflection

This week and the last highlighted my issues in time management, planning and judgement as a leader and for that reason I am hoping to rectify these issues starting from next week by dedicating more time to this project, communicating with the other departments more closely and more consistently using Jira/Confluence as a collaborative resource.

Alongside that, I will likely be spending next week trying to rewrite the code for the turn-based combat system so that it is more in-line with my original vision for it and I will assign tasks for the other programmers that should include either polishing existing features or adding new ones.

That is all that I have to show this week, thank you for continuing to read about the development of this game and I will see you next week.