Like most, if not all, of my peers the endgame or this course is to use it as a springboard into the game development industry whether that be working for a studio as an employee or building and running an indie studio. My preference is for the latter. I’ve tried on many occasions over the…
For this week’s challenge I chose the maths game I wrote for the first game jam. This was a maths based game, design to help children learn their times tables and can be found here: Week 6: Game Jam Beta Release 0.1.x Ordinarily the avatars would have come first but just this once I’ll do…
With the theme of Week 10 being Agile, I felt I was in for an easy week — a chance to catch up as I’d fallen behind slightly with my studies. Agile Development is something I’ve been practising since about 2008/9. I was trained in Enterprise Agile at Symbian Software then involved in the roll-out…
As we mentioned in the last post in the Working with Agile series, stories are the main workhorses of Agile Development. Stoies are what we load into our sprints, stories are what the team works on and stories are what the team delivers once their work is complete. Delivering all the stories in an Epic…
Following on from my previous post which gave a brief overview of Agile Development, it’s now time to look at the Backlog in more detail. In particular I want to focus on the early part of the process where the development team builds the Agile Backlog from the items on the Product Roadmap. The product…
I wanted to give an overview of the Agile Development process I was trained in whilst working for Symbian Software. Because of the size of the organisation, this is more of an Enterprise Agile implementation but scales very well right down to a single team of 1. This is the first in a series of…
Having run a small business for almost 8 years I can fully understand and appreciate how important communities of practice are for Indie Game Studios. It came as no surprise therefore that this topic featured in our very first module. In the past I’ve found external communities, whether they be on-line or off-line to be…
Performance for the three weeks in Sprint 3 is given in the two burndown charts below followed by the velocity report. Sprint 3 covered the period for weeks 7, 8 and 9 of the course. As you can see, I did no planning for week 7 at all. I fell off the wagon owing to…
Game jam 2 caught me by surprise. It came a week earlier than I anticipated and I was completely unprepared. Unlike the first jam where I was on the blocks and awaiting the starter’s pistol on the Wednesday, I was very late to the party and didn’t really start work until the Saturday. 25% of…
Week 8 caught me by surprise. I originally thought research would cover the technology behind game development such as AI, procedural generation or perhaps AR/VR. I was wrong. Instead, this particular section of the module would focus on something far more important: User research and the ethics associated with soliciting feedback from others. With hindsight,…
