“Sprint Retrospective”? What’s that?
To put it simply it’s a review of a block of work completed over a set period of time. I follow a loose interpretation of agile methodology that works for me by breaking down the work of a large project into manageable chunks called stories or tasks (depending on the size) and allocating them to myself over a set period of time called a sprint. My sprints last two weeks (less other commitments) which is a nice way to give myself time to actually get stuff done but not so much to get tunnel vision and head in the wrong direction.
So what’s been done in the first sprint of the project?
I had done a bit of work prior to organisation so the first task was to assess what I had and better plan for the future. While less fun than coalface game development as such it’s an essential and extremely useful thing to do.
So a base gameplay loop has been created of starting the game, navigating a home menu, into a local match with a base ruleset with winning conditions and back to the main menu.
Once that had been done I started on a presentation mode for the game – this won’t make it to the final release but it will be used for demonstration purposes at conferences I plan to attend, such as GDC in March. That will have the currently available theme that’s in version 1.0 to act as eye candy for anyone potentially interested in supporting the project.
Aside from that there’s been behind the scenes evaluation of some services that will help the game scale and support the long awaited features.