This week’s learning was centered around working in teams and organizing projects. During our Monday session, we covered topics related to soft skills and created a team contract. We outlined how we prefer to communicate and how we would go about resolving any issues that might arise. Alongside this, we all spent time this week researching how to handle our specific assigned roles. We had a lot of discussions about the original game content, deciding which parts of the GDD needed to be changed and what our main priorities should be. It was quite fitting since our game Backchat deals with social communications and the problems associated with them. The experience made us aware that we must communicate with empathy to ensure no misunderstandings arise from the development process.
Thursday was about Agile methodology and preparing our first vertical slice. We got acquainted with creating a project roadmap and splitting user stories from the original GDD into separate testable tasks. As part of the Agile practice, we also performed daily stand-up meetings where we tracked our progress and pointed out the existing blockers. The application of the SMART criteria was a massive wake-up call for us. To ensure that all the tasks in our sprints are feasible, we have to be very careful about our scope. We committed our first basic prototype tasks into the sprint backlog to see how the code team handles the original design.