Of Progress, Rewards, and Spooky Things

Today I'm going to talk a little bit more about teams. For all that content is super important (I mean, it's literally what makes up the game), in my experience with development most of the conversation focuses on content creation, so throughout development of Project Kassa, I'll be making periodic blog posts about other aspects that are important as well but seem to get a bit less emphasis. You'll be able to find all these posts under the "Producer" tag if you'd like to read more of them.

Last time I wrote one of these, it was about the assembly of a team, today we're going to talk a little bit about a lot of things, ultimately boiling down to morale. Keeping team morale high is important for team health, sanity, and quality of work. A team with low morale won't work as hard, or as well, as a team that is happy with themselves, each other, and the project.

One of the most important things to keeping morale high is a sense of accomplishment. People who have achieved something, or feel like they have, generally feel better about themselves and whatever it is they're working on. One of the easiest ways to do this is to track progress. Now there are a ton of ways to do this, and what is going to work for one team won't necessarily work for another, and sometimes what works for one team might only work for a specific project, so I'm going to stick with talking about what we're doing for this project rather than going too into the many options available.

We initially tried using VersionOne, which is a lovely site that I highly recommend trying if you are a fan of scrum and are looking for a reasonably priced option for it, the staff was communicative and the I found the interface very easy to learn and use. Unfortunately, it went under utilized, it didn't mesh well with the team. What we wound up with, and has been working so far for us, is a simple whiteboard.

Current Whiteboard

Different team members have different colored post-its, and we have three columns "To-Do," "In Progress," and "Completed." Only tasks from the current milestone (which - for us - is monthly), or outstanding from past milestones, are on the whiteboard. Each team member is responsible for moving their tasks to the appropriate column as they progress, and at the end of the milestone we take all the "Completed" post-its and stick them here:

Our progress spindle!

We bought a receipt spindle from an office supply store. There's something satisfying about impaling completed tasks on a pointy object. You may notice that our particular progress spindle has several marks on it, when we got it we decided to break it up into inches and whenever we complete enough tasks to reach an inch, we go on a morale adventure.

Morale adventures are fun, we've already done one in the form of visiting Fort Stevens in Oregon and Cape Disappointment in Washington, which gave us the additional benefit of a TON of photo/video/sound reference for our game as well as an opportunity to get out as a team and do something.

For our first inch, which we are rapidly approaching, we're discussing going to the ghost town Monte Cristo in Washington, where Danny and Branden will get us killed by following horror movie tropes instead of being sensible about the whole thing. The other options include the haunted soda machine in Seattle, or doing the Pike Street ghost tours. Obviously we lean towards spooky rewards, given the focus of our game and our apparent disinterest in not getting murdered by ghosts.

And once again, this post is turning out long, so I'm going to end it here, and talk a little bit more about smaller-scale morale boosting events in a later post.

Project Kassa - Introductions and A Cabal

First, some introductions.

This Blog:
This production blog will detail the creation process of Project Kassa, the working title for a series of episodic, co-op, survival/horror, adventure games produced by Biweekly Games. The games tell the story of Gabe and Dani Kassa, a pair of siblings, who are trying to re-capture the evils that have been released from Pandora's Box.

The Team:
Allison Kinzelman - Producer, VFX Artist, Animator
Ryan Sand - Art Director, Environment Artist, Texture Artist, Creative Director
Branden Gee - Chief Technical Lead
Danny Huynh - Concept Artist, Animator, Visionary
Frank Schorsch - Technical Artist, Modeler, Animator
Paul Kankiewicz - Consultant

We're currently in the beginning phases of the project, and yesterday (8/25/13) we had a game cabal to discuss several aspects of it.

Titles:
While "Project Kassa" is our working title, we don't like it for a permanent one, so of course we need to come up with something we like better. We wound up mostly just brainstorming this, and coming up with a few we liked fairly well but weren't in love with (Cycle of Discord/Chains of Discord), so we'll be revisiting this at a later date.

Horror Events:
We brainstormed out all sorts of ideas for horror events, varying both in implementability and in quality. We might have had a few more ideas for these than for titles.

We went through all of our suggestions and red X-ed those that were just bad or impossible, blue X-ed those that were possible but might be difficult or were just okay, and finally green checked those that we all agreed upon and were relatively easy to implement. We also discovered just how many sound-based ideas we had come up with.

Kickstarter:
We figured out rewards and reward tiers for our eventual Kickstarter plans, though we'll be waiting to release those until we release said Kickstarter.

Working:
Just some pictures of us working the Kickstarter plans together, when Ryan remembered he had his camera with him.