About the project:
This game was made for the Project Management with Agile Methods 2 course at Uppsala University. The purpose of this project was to make use of scrum and Kanban to gain experience in these forms of agile methods. Scrum would be used at the start as it was the method we were most familiar with. The project would then become a tool for us to learn Kanban with.
At the start of the project, we were set up with the prompt of expected chance. This meant that the game we were going to make had to have a system(s) of chance, of which the player could anticipate its effects. We came up with the idea of an arcade game that would take place on 4 planes. The player could move between these planes and shoot down enemy ships. However, certain coloured ships that would randomly spawn would teleport the player to another plane. For the first assignment of the course this was turned into a paper prototype and together with 50% of all projects voted on to continue into the second assignment.
During the second assignment, our team size was doubled by students of groups that hadn’t been voted on to continue. At this point, me and my good friend Mohammed took on the role of product owners for the project. During this assignment, we started working in micro sprints of 3 hours in order to make a digital prototype. During the 3rd assignment, we then switched to using Kanban for the first time while working on the final version of the game for the course. Due to some needs of the project and after consulting with the teacher, we altered the use of the Kanban board given to us and made use of upstream Kanban during this assignment.
My work on the project:
As one of the original 3 members of the group, I was part of the creation of the concept for the game and the paper playtesting. Later on, I took on the role of product owner together my friend at the start of assignment 2. At this point, all of us also took on specific production related roles, which in my case was programming due to earlier experience with it.
Aside from what is listed above, there isn’t much noteworthy of my work on the project. Due to fairly limiting time constraints at times and a certain lack of expertise in production fields (we were all project management students) not a lot of noteworthy work was done. As mentioned in the previous section, the most important part of this project was the opportunity to work with Scrum and Kanban. We were also tested on our knowledge of these at certain points during the course. And while I already had quite a good amount of experience with Scrum, I was able to lay a good foundation on my knowledge of Kanban. The project ended with a fully playable game that, while not necessarily the most impressive, is a project that had some useful steps in my growth as a producer. At the same time, I was also really impressed with how much of a fun mechanic we were able to design and make in such a short time.