Project Time One

Hey everybody - Joey here. I'm going to try and keep this update quick - I'm running a teeny bit behind on project blog updates so for the very immediate future I'm going to stick with quantity rather than quality.

So I guess it's the middle of August. Crazy to think that I've already been at this for seven (7) weeks. The good news is that we're no longer in full crunch mode, having managed some pre-production during production last month. The team is no longer flying by the seat of its pants and the production staff has instituted some meager semblance of order. The art Scrum wall is up and (mostly) updated. The Hansoft server is up-to-date with task duration estimates and task duration tracking so we should be able to come up with velocities for individual art team members some time in the next month or two. That information will drastically improve our ability to schedule.

Some of the same issues prevail, specifically the ones that the production staff simply has no control over. There's no real control over team work hours so team members continue to filter in and out of the office. This makes work tracking difficult for several reasons, but mostly because we can't reliably track work done off-site. That's not our call, though, so we're working with what we've got. Still not a lot of feedback from the client. There seems to be little use in trying to explain that if they don't get back to us we're going to have a hard time giving them exactly what they want. The production team isn't in direct contact from the client, and I've gotten the impression that even if we were it would be tough to get the answers we'd like. Such is life.

One of the issues that we have been able to fix is artist gold plating. A lot of our art assets don't have to be very hi-res, but some of our team members have been working excessively to get around the poly count. Normally this might be a good thing, but the attention to detail is actually taking some of the assets over time estimates. We've taken steps to resolve the issue through explanation and task monitoring, but there's not much we can do when team members are working off-site.

That's kind of the gist of the situation right now... More to come as events warrant. Or next week. Or whatever.

Peace!