Recently I have joined the team No Scope Studios as a designer for the game Vacuum Vault. The game is a first person puzzle platformer where the player can use a “vacuum gun” to collect resources and build with them. The player’s goal is to explore several areas of an alien planet in order to find their grandfather who had gone missing somewhere on it. I asked to be put on the game as I felt it was lacking a clear narrative and I had several Ideas for new systems using the vacuum gun. I was accepted onto the team and now am one day away from completing our first sprint (our sprints are one week long). In the future I hope to go into detail about team interactions and design problems that the project faced. In this blog however I would like to reflect what I have done in order to assure that I am successful during this project.
In the past I have had issues managing my time. It is my hope that with this new project I can start with a clean slate and build good habits while eliminating bad ones. I’d like to take time in this blog to go over my three biggest issues in this field and my plan to resolve them. The three main issues I’ve had were improperly prioritizing tasks, underestimating hours, and not having a schedule.
In the past there have been times where due to miscommunications I completed non priority tasks before those that were. This led to some tasks not being completed in time for testing meaning we would not get feedback on it for another week. During this semester I am committed to better communicating with my team to determine priority. During this fist sprint I have already begun this process as I have been in contact with the product owner about the priority of my different tasks.
An issue I had during my last project was an overestimation of how much I could accomplish in a sprint and an underestimation of how long task would take. This would lead to my inability to complete some tasks during a sprint that I had committed to as I had over committed. In the past this would cause a lack of trust between my team and I. This lack of trust was devastating to the team and broke down communication and collaboration quite a bit. During this semester I will be only committing to the minimum required hours for the project and pulling in stories from the backlog if I have more time. This will allow me to make good on my commitments by leaving room in case some tasks take longer than planned. It also enables me to take on extra work by working with the product owner to pull in a story ahead of time.
My final, and perhaps biggest issue was my lack of appropriate scheduling. In the past I had been using a planar to schedule each individual day and my phone calendar to remember appointments. This worked for day to day planning but left a gap in my long term planning. Putting too many events in my phone calendar would leave it cluttered and my planar was designed for day to day planning. To solve this I have bought a physical calendar which I will be keeping track of my long-term appointments and my plan for what task I will do on each day. I will consult this calendar each day while making my journal to make sure that I am on track to accomplish all my goals for the sprint.
It is my hope that by implementing these changes I will not only manage my time better but also be a better team member. Many of the issues noted had to do with communication (or a lack there of). By implementing these changes and improving how I communicate I expect to see substantial growth in both my communication and collaborator skills. It goes without saying that these are some of the most important skills a designer can have so this will drastically help with my growth.
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