A Taste of the Good Life -- Week Ending 3 Sep

It has been interesting working as the producer on our team. Every day I seem to learn something new about what my duties entail (or could entail, depending on the circumstances of the team). The most direct job description that I've been able to come up with, via professor lectures and my own limited experience, is more or less "the one who enables everyone else to get their work done." On that note, however, it also seems that my responsibilities could become endless, essentially, if I don't make an effort to rein it in. I can see it becoming natural to try and actually do other people's work rather than to simply enable them to do it more efficiently (or at all). The problem here is that I'm not a brilliant engineer (I have limited programming knowledge and experience), nor am I a top-notch artist (though, I can hold my own with digital art). This is simultaneously disheartening and relieving; I'd love to have the skills to create complex video games completely by myself, yet being part of a team and having distributed responsibilities can be far more efficient--and then I don't have to do it completely by myself.

Those thoughts considered, I am still the type who will try to help out on specific tasks and do my share of work on the actual project whenever and wherever possible, especially when holding any sort of lead or management role. After all, I can't expect anyone else on my team to do work that I wouldn't be willing to do myself.

That was a fair bit more introduction to this entry than I expected, but maybe it was a good preface to my list of accomplished tasks this week. Here we go:

- Finalized the product (game prototype) backlog with my team (this began unofficially last week, when we first came up with a pitch), then assigned each backlog item to individual team members based on their skill sets

- Created a dynamic spreadsheet for the current Scrum sprint that automatically tracks and charts specific work hour data with only simple updates
- Made said sprint document available via Google docs so that all team members can access it and update it from anywhere
-  Researched trash, pollution, and other environmental problems that would be applicable information to present in the context of our "serious game."
- Wrote the in-game text for minor tutorials and for the researched information, then created art assets for those text popups

- Created a number of art assets for the game by using photo references, digital photographs, Photoshop, and Illustrator:

hazardous slime puddle,
slime projectiles,
beach ball,
beach umbrellas,
plastic bottle,
paper bunch,
character ammo (an educational flyer!),
and a menacing slime wave based on Hokusai's The Great Wave off Kanagawa

- Gave pep talks as necessary (woo!)

Now I'm off to update the general blog for our game; it's located at http://devdiaryuofu.blogspot.com. Check it out if you want to follow the progression of the games that I work on during my time here in the U of U's EAE:MGS!

- Troy