Thoughs on my leadership

Today’s Blogpost

Since this will be one of my last posts for awhile I was considering doing this as a recap of what I have done good and what I need to improve for next time.

First of all I think that my team has made a good game and that I feel proud to have been part of that team. The effort and dedication they have put in to make it possible is something I admire and feel will make them excellent game developers in the future.

However this journey has been rough at times and I think much of it boils down to my leadership. I have tried to have a hands off approach on how they have performed their tasks and to allow them to have as much freedom on how to finish them. Sadly I feel that in the process I might have become slightly detached from the developers and that in the future I will need to find a balance between creative freedom and restraints.

Secondly was working with Scrum. I like the tool and think it could be a great way to organize a team in the future. Still I feel that my own experience is a bit too small to use it effectively and need more practice with it to manage a team. I feel that overtime I have made some errors that have stacked and slowed down the process. However this just allows for more improvements from myself and that for the next project I can make some adjustments.

For example I had some issues organizing my daily standup and finding things to discuss. Secondly I feel that I didn’t ask my team enough questions and that in the future I need to do that more. My reason for this was that I assumed that if they had problems they would tell me, but that proved to not be the case all the time.

Luckily my team has been kind enough to give me constructive feedback on improvements and what they thought I did good. So now I feel more confident that I can do this aslong as I keep the problems in mind and work on them.

This is all for now.

Sound Design

Hello once again my readers.

For this post I will talk about sound design and finding it.

When I first started on the sound I had a big problem finding a site where I could find copyright free sound for the weapons or ambient noise in the game. I tried searching for different sites, but a member of my game design team sent me a link to a website called freesound.org which contains many different sounds completely free.

The biggest problem however except from finding the sound was deciding which sound would be the best suited. For example I was looking to find a sound for our assault rifle in the game and got a large amount of results. As I was scrolling through them I found that it was hard to find a sound that would match in a manner expected in a game. I first found a sound from a real rifle, but decided against that one since it sound more like an explosion than a “proper” rifle. Instead I would look for the sounds made from other sources such as drums or dropping marbles on sheet metal. This created the more expected bang sound needed for our rifle in the game.

 

This gave me an interesting insight as I studied more about sound design that quite a large amount of sound that is used in games aren’t really common in real life and this continued as I searched for sounds for our bazooka and other weaponry.

However the most difficult part came when I needed to find an ambient sound needed to convey that the game takes place underwater. Searching for underwater ambient noise was just a dead end since most of the recording didn’t match my expectations. 

However I was a bit lucky since the term yielded one useful result which was a cool tide like sound I would say that conveyed a sense of being underwater while not being to obtrusive.

As such I decided to use that as an ambient noise and tried to move to the next part which was finding game music. This task is something I am still working on since I have tried contacting people I know to do it for me for compensation as I lack the skill to create my own song and finding one that isn’t copyrighted seems impossible.

This is all for me this week so see you next time. Bye

 

First Post

Welcome to my blog.
For this first post I will write about group dynamics and project work.

Working on a project for me has been a big eye opener compared to other work I have done before and it has forced me to learn.

Before I came to this school I didn’t really think that there were models for how projects should be executed or models for how to organize them. In fact I thought that most projects relied mostly on that people “winged it” and then solved problems as they arose.

When we started working on this game we were told to use a method called Scrum which we had learned a bit about in project management class. At first I felt that it was a strange tool to use as the way you documented and had sprints, but as I became more secure in my role and my understanding of the progress I started to see the advantages of the system.

 

Last semester when I was still learning Scrum I felt that progress was much slower and that it was hard to organize the different members of the group. And as such the performance seemed to drop with time due to a generally lackluster leadership at that point from my side.

However now when we use Scrum it is much easier to see when problems arise and to deal with them. The main reason for this is the daily meetings and also the sprint planning and sprint reviews allowed me to catch problems as people reported them more consistently.

Why this happens is that the agile method of Scrum allows for a lot of variation on how to work within and how to divide tasks allowing the group members pick tasks that they feel confident they can finish in time. Secondly it also allows project managers to focus more on working on solving problems rather than spending most of the time working on the documentation.

However a downside would be that I feel that if a group is to big then Scrum won’t allow the project manager to have a good overview and also the communication between group members will be cluttered and no one will know what they are doing and why.

As such I can understand why we learn working with this methodology in this course as it will allow us to get used to it in a working environment and also is one of the more efficient ways to manage for now.