Keeper Sprint 14: The New Team

+Animator: Nick Kinteris

+Designer: Steven Margolin

+Programmer: Jacob Ruth

After the completion of our vertical slice, several new developers joined Micropup to help us carry this to completion. We brought an animator onto the team to help bring to life the many characters we plan to include in our story, as their placeholder models currently do not correctly convey the type of warmth we are trying to achieve within the world. We also picked up another narrative designer to alleviate some of my responsibilities as well as hopefully build upon said story and world. Our final new member is a programmer, as Micropup only had one before and their workload was difficult to bear by themselves. All in all, I think the team made good decisions about which areas we needed support and chose well in filling those roles.

During our first meeting we introduced our sprint cycle method to the new members, assigning basic tasks so everyone can get used to their position and workflow. Since more members means the different disciplines of development within the team have grown, I have also tried to encourage smaller scrum meetings between those who have tasks unrelated to the rest of the team. The designers practice this with a short narrative meeting once a week to address any changes that need to be made to the story, and the programmers have planned out a small work session on the weekends to ease implementation of their new code.

The next big milestone for Keeper is our greenlight that will allow us to begin developing an actual alpha, beta, and eventually gold master. We think with what we have created so far will certainly carry us past this initial greenlight stage, but we still plan to use the time we have left to deliver the very best we possibly can.