Final sprint retrospective

Our project has come to an end to and to mark it, we had our final sprint retrospective in which we would reflect on what went well, what went wrong and can be improved and where there is more potential to do more in future.

We were unable to find a time when all of us were free at the same time to discuss in real time, so we decided to do an async retrospective in which we created a board on Miro (Miro, 2021) to document all of our thoughts.

One member of our team used a template title Rose, Thorn and Bud in which we organise each of our thoughts on virtual sticky notes according to three categories as follows:

  • Rose – successes, what went well, what we should continue doing in future projects
  • Thorn – what we didn’t do so well, areas where we need to improve to be successful in the future
  • Bud – potential – areas where we shown potential but need improvements

Here are some screenshots of each of the categories, as well as the instructions as to how we do this. You will see several of the points that the team contributed in these screenshots. To see them more clearly, you may need to click to expand them.

What is good is that each of the points various team members raised were similar, which mean that we reached a consensus.

I will list a few of the points that I made for each category and talk through them.

Rose:

  • Both levels were very different in terms of how they are solved or engaged with.
    • We agreed that I would design one level and Luke would design the other. One of the successes of this was that both our levels were very different and required different abilities. Mine mostly involved jumping and timing, whereas Luke’s involved solving of puzzles. This reflects the dynamic nature of our game concept.
  • We communicated transparently and honestly with one another. Team members were always willing to help each other out and demonstrate their skills
    • All team members were honest about any personal issues they were having that may have affected our progress on the project. Similarly, a lot of team members were happy to sit down with others and talk them through their processes
  • Those who got to play our game demo wanted to see more of how the game would look as more was added
    • This was evidenced by our survey in which many people got to play and answered that they wanted to see more.
  • We came up with a really intriguing concept for our game and our user research provided evidence that others believed so too
    • This was also indicated in the survey we circulated.

Thorn:

  • We did not maintain the Scrum framework as much as we could have
    • We did not adhere to this as much as we could have and this may have slowed down our progress. Two others also indicate that we did not maintain the Trello board and we did not always have meetings when we said we would, which goes hand-in-hand with this point
  • We did not have time to create our own assets for the game, although the assets ultilised were of good quality and they were used very effectively by the team
    • I was disappointed that I did not get to practice Blender and create some models for the game as this was something I was aiming to do. However, we were restricted by time and I do believe that with the assets we obtained, we used them effectively and creatively. This is backed up by various comments from people in our survey who say they enjoyed exploring the environment.
  • We did not have time to do proper QA although we effectively outsourced this to our external play testers as part of our user research
    • This was overlooked again due to time constraints, but I believe we made up for this to some extent by the feedback that was left by our play testers.

Bud:

  • We thought about how we could further develop the game in terms of mechanics we could add, abilities the player could adopt and also ways of making the game more accessible
    • When we finalised our game concept during the ideation stage, we generated loads of ideas that could be incorporated into the game, regarding story and mechanics. These could be utilised if we choose to to develop the game further in future
  • Team members have spoken about further developing some of our earlier ideas for this project
    • There has been discussion about this on our Discord server
  • Our skills in Unity are a lot stronger than they were before
    • Speaks for itself, I am not proficient in Unity yet but I understand more of it than previously
  • Most of the team have worked together twice and we have found we work well together. We are able to work together to brainstorm strong ideas for game concepts
    • Most of us have already worked together previously during the Ludlum Dare game jam and we are good at coming up with ideas together. Despite time constraints and personal commitments, we all work very well together.

References

2021. Miro. San Francisco, CA: RealtimeBoard, Inc.[Software]

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