Technical Journal - November - May | Scrum Weekly Work Journal

My task for this sprint was primarily to figure out a way to project a video asset onto an object, preferably using something like a decal projector. I found out very quickly that this would not be possible, and instead discovered the Video Player component that could be put on objects, such as planes and altered cubes. This allowed for an easy method to play a test video on a screen object (with some additional lights to allow the video to be seen properly), and then providing the finished version with the intended cutscene to the rest of the team to garner opinions and feedback.

The aim for this sprint in terms of velocity was to be consistently productive and get bug fixes and interactive narration implemented to further benefit the game. Unfortunately, as one team member went radio silent during this sprint, we had to divide this plan between 3 people rather than 4.

Motivation during this sprint ended up being at an all-time low, which resulted in long stretches of work not being done despite the plan agreed upon. We ended up needing to complete 20 hours of work within the 2 final days of the sprint. To add to this, the silent team member suddenly returned to add tasks to the sprint under their name a day before the sprint was due to be completed, marking them as completed as soon as they went in. This resulted in the burndown chart looking much more unorganised and hectic than it already had.

Due to the fact that we've ended up with so many tasks to complete within the final one-week sprint, motivation seems to have returned and hopefully this will spell a good result for our final release of the project. There's still a lot of work to be done between further bug fixes, testing and trailer creation, but the team is determined to come out on top at the end of this release and have a great game to show for it.

The work I did for this sprint related back to feedback received on what we had completed for the Production Release - we were given the idea to include some objects around the theater to make the environment feel more lived in and active. For this, I decided to create some extra models that would fit in on floors of any auditorium - popcorn buckets and soda cups.

Before I jumped into creating these models, I first researched vintage versions of each object to stay true to the 1930s style we're aiming for. I also wanted to include some extra common cinema objects like soda machines and speakers, so looked these up too. From my research, I found out that popcorn was originally sold in bags rather than the boxes we know today, and so I made separate models of a bag and bucket, to both keep the vintage feel and reinforce the more modernised elements of the theater as well.

Another interesting find was the ever first soda-dispensing machine created for Coca-Cola in 1933 - this design fit in perfectly with the vision I had for a vintage dispenser, and so I based the model of the drink dispenser off of this.

Another interesting discovery was the Speakers of the 1930s - the specific one that I found, a Super Power 6-volt S.P.6, ended up having a very simplistic design that could be broken down into primitive 3D objects, and so I started with a cylinder and a cube when making this model. I was very proud of the final result.

I've included a collage image of the other models I worked on during this sprint below - this includes singular popcorn buckets and soda cups to be used for cleaning tasks, and stacks of each to be used in the snack bar area of the Lobby.

References for Image Resources:

Popcorn Bag: https://generic.wordpress.soton.ac.uk/cifr/2019/08/21/lets-all-go-to-the-lobby-how-concessions-shape-cinema/

Soda Machine: https://www.antiquetrader.com/collectibles/coca-cola-historic-dispenser

Speaker: https://www.radiomuseum.org/r/baker_super_power_1930.html

Spent an extra evening reworking the lights in each scene, changing the lamps from having a light component to having two cone-shaped lights emitting from them instead to make it look like the light is actually coming from the lamp itself. Also reduced the number of light sources in some scenes and changed the mood of lights in the Hallway and MaintenanceRoom scenes.

All lights were changed from baked to mixed so that dynamic objects could still cast shadows and be lit by light sources - this works better for objects thrown around/moved by anomalies.

Spent the last couple of days adding baked lighting and light probes to the updated scenes of our game. I vouched for warm and cool white lights to both suit the era of the building and the types of lights being added (chandeliers, lamps, etc.). I also made this decision to make sure that the lights have the same intensity and feel in both colour and greyscale.

The team ended up completing way fewer tasks this sprint then what was originally planned. This is due to external/personal situations that some members of the team needed to tend to before they could dedicate any time to the project this sprint. So, this time around the team's low velocity was, for the most part, out of the team's control, and wouldn't have happened had these external situations happened.

For now, it's best to move forward into our final sprint of the release and finish as many high-priority tasks as possible to give us time to carry out some user testing before we complete the Production release. However, our small workload last sprint means we each have a lot to do for this final sprint - we have 60.5 estimated hours of work to do within this last sprint.

Provided everything goes mostly smoothly, and the team completes tasks by the time they expect to, then we should be able to complete this workload efficiently and to the best of our ability.

Early on in this sprint, I wanted to solve the issue the team had found with the way in which we were giving instructions to players on what to do upon starting the game - for our previous release, due to time crunches and being behind on work, we ended up having to throw blocks of text on the walls of our game scenes in order to let players know to interact with certain items or complete tasks. This is a very jarring, inefficient way to provide players with context and could be improved upon so as to not take players out of the experience.

I was initially inspired by posters that would have been printed to motivate employees in the workplace of the 1950s - the era the game's theater is from. These posters were uplifting and also provided information on things like how to communicate in the workplace, motivating one's self to work for the best results, and getting stuck into projects rather than thinking about them:

I then went and looked into games that use these same kinds of posters to give the players context in relation to the game's world and about items they can obtain and use. Some good examples I found were from Bioshock, Fallout, and Alice: Madness Returns:

From here, I decided to design similar posters with interactable and collectable objects as the focal point of each poster, similar to what I found from videogame posters, and include some text about what these objects can do to benefit the player, combining both the real life motivational posters and videogame posters to make completely new ones for our own game.

I decided to choose some simplistic backgrounds for each poster so that the featured objects can still be easily made out in greyscale. One the new textures for the bed and tool model are added, these two posters can be remade with the coloured assets to match the fully coloured task machine poster. I also plan to make an extra poster to depict how to interact with the mannequin mechanic, but I also believe having some voice lines relating to the mechanic could also be effective and save players from having to do a lot of reading before they can start playing.

At the beginning of this final 1-week sprint, the team came together to decide on a plan to complete as many essential backlog items as possible for the Pre-Production release and even allow for some testing towards the second half of the sprint. Most of the work was planned to be completed over the weekend in the sprint, so that ample testing time was left in the final days of the sprint.

However, when it came to actually starting the sprint, the team ran into some issues with motivation on some people's parts. Those that were really dedicated to getting essential work done came out with some amazing results - voice lines and new anomalies were created and some of the planned rooms for the game were laid out and decorated in our Unity project.

In other cases, however, the motivation wasn't there - this resulted in work not being completed, and then work being started on late and the weekend's work essentially being left out. The team has been scrambling to get back on track and clear up everything that's gone wrong in the past day or so, and this has resulted in the Scrum plan being put aside until these issues were resolved.

The team needs to reprioritise the remaining sprint items as soon as possible, which will more than likely involve removing testing from the sprint and holding off on this until next release, and focusing on creating a playable demo of the game. For now, the priority should be getting essential content into the project to be shown to lecturers in our upcoming demonstration. After this, we can plan ahead for what we want to achieve in the Production sprint

Over the last 4 or so days of the current sprint, my confidence in the team's motivation and velocity in Scrum being kept up has started to dwindle. From Friday up until just yesterday, there had been no more backlog items assigned to this sprint completed. I understood that, over the weekend, everyone had assignments to complete and so I was expecting the velocity to drop then, but I think the team ended up needing more of a break afterwards than they expected, and so the velocity stayed stagnant. While today saw the completion of 69% of the assigned work and the release only be 100 story points behind (a huge improvement from before this sprint), I still cannot see the team completing every backlog item in the release before our deadline.

As a result, the remaining backlog items to be completed in this sprint need to be removed before the sprint ends, and it is now crucial for the team to start prioritising backlog items in order to have the best resulting game by the end of the next sprint. To achieve this, I will be holding a meeting with the team tomorrow to discuss each remaining task and whether it's crucial that it be completed now or whether it can be put off to the next release, or even dropped from the project entirely. This will help in redirecting our focus to the most important incomplete aspects of our game.

In terms of my other roles, I managed to complete the list of 3D models that was set up to be done for this release. These models suit many different areas within our theater like the auditorium, lobby and backstage and can be used as props, architecture, light sources and collectables. We knew we had to keep frame rates within our game as consistently high as possible, and part of that would come from keeping the polygon count in our models very low, which I think I have achieved with these models while still ensuring they were able to be recognised as what objects they were meant to be.

So far in this sprint, the team has made some great progress with the planned workload, to the point where we have ended up being some hours ahead of the planned work in Scrum. This has given some members of the team more time to dedicate to the project and so they have assigned extra work to keep themselves busy during the second half of the sprint:

Since there are still separate projects that need to be completed and submitted by Sunday, January 15th, the hours for the remaining days in the sprint have been changed slightly to provide the team more time to dedicate to other projects. After Sunday, everyone will be able to go full steam ahead with Monochrome and complete the assigned sprint work by the deadline: