During my time in game development I have learned that Murphy's law is not just a possibility but an inevitability. What can go wrong usually will and as developers we must be prepared to adapt to it and modify our plans accordingly. In this blog I would like to talk about a time in development where unforeseen issues arise and how I adapted to them.
One of the big issues that I had recently that affected development was a family emergency that I had to deal with mid sprint. I won't go into specifics but because of it I was forced to be absent for almost half of the sprint and unable to do work. Because of the sudden nature of the event we were not aware or able to plan around it when planning the sprint. As such my tasks for the sprint had to be adjusted to be doable in my time frame.
The first thing I did after becoming aware of this event was to promptly contact the team’s product owner. I explained the situation to him and told him the amount of time I would be required to be away. We then proceeded to go though my tasks and confirm their priority. Since I would not be able to supply my normal amount of hours this was important as low priority tasks would most likely not be complete.
After this I then went to my team’s producers in order to inform them of my absence in the upcoming day’s meetings. We discussed how this would affect them and how I could stay up to date on the project while I was away. The solution that we found was that I would take 15 minutes a day while absent to communicate with my producers in order to stay up to date on the project.
Finally I then proceeded to contact all of my peers which I had meeting with during that time. I explained the situation and apologized for having to miss our meeting. I tried to be as honest as possible about the situation without oversharing. Because of this my peers were sympathetic and understood why I had to leave without feeling hurt or offended by the cancellation.
Because of these steps my absence while still a set back was not as damaging as it could have been. Because of my communication all of my peers and leads were aware of my abscess and knew to work around it. I was also still able to keep up to date because of my communication with my producers while absent. Most importantly when I returned I was still able to complete the highest priority tasks because they had been prioritized before hand
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