Production Plan - ChillChiliStudio/Order227 GitHub Wiki

Main Index

Introduction

In this document we will stablish the guidelines to follow in matters of organization, timing, timelines, scheduling and team dynamics.

General Calendar

The production is planned to be performed in 11 weeks during the beginning of 2019, starting on March 14th, having the last day (June the 2nd) a Gold version of the game. Pre-Production is going to end on 10th March with the first milestone, the Concept Discovery. Also, in a more specific view, we will seek to have a final build one week before each official deadline and to leave 1 week of full QA and game polishing and to deliver two days before the official deadline to have an error margin.

Let's see the calendar month by month, beginning by March calendar April calendar And finally, the May calendar including the two first days of June. As seen, we will have in April 12th a first prototype (a Vertical Slice) and an Alpha version of the game in May the 12th.

Sprints

  • 1 Week - 1 Sprint: We will have weekly objectives according with the milestones and weekly meetings. Each sprint is meant to last a week (maybe some days more or less since we don’t have the exact days that complete the 11 weeks of production), so in the monday meetings we will review the last sprint and organize the next one, and in thursday we will have a mid-week sprint review to organize the weekend looking at next monday.
  • Group meetings: Group meetings are already taking place every monday at 9am and every thursday at 12.30pm. In monday meetings we will review the last sprint tasks (if there are any pendant, we will pass it to the next sprint with a higher priority) and prepare the next sprint and week objectives (so a new board will be created in HacknPlan). In thursday meeting we will see how everything is going, if someone needs help and we will organize the weekend. Here we can see an example screenshot of a week of the team in HacknPlan board:

To keep in contact with other member teams we’ve setup a personal discord room to easily see who is working at that moment and in what is using his efforts (this will be also confirmed by HacknPlan). It will be useful for the manager to know what are the team members doing at the moment and for the teammates to help each other with any problems they have.

Milestones

In order to properly produce the project, we will finish pre-production phase with a Concept Discovery in which all the needed documentation will be provided in order to begin the Production phase, which will have 3 milestones. The completion of these milestones will be ensured with the weekly sprints and depth planning, controlled with the weekly meetings and daily stand-ups. The next are a specification of requirements for each milestone:

1. Pre-Production

  • Concept Discovery (March 10th)
    • Game Design Document
    • Technical Design Document
    • Audio Bible
    • Art Bible
    • Q&A Plan
    • Production Plan
    • UI Document

2. Production

  • Vertical Slice (April 21th)

    • Basic Map with working Base and Terrain without Fog of War
    • Basic Infantry Divisions (Allied & Enemies) & Basic Control - Basic Infantry, Bazooka, Machine Gun, Sniper, Cows and Dogs - Attack, Move and Hold
    • Basic Hordes System (5 easy waves)
    • Win & Lose Condition with current waves quantity
    • Basic AI Behaviour - Objective Fixing, Pathfinding and attack
    • Economic System (money gathering and expenditure)
    • Primarly Strategic Point Control System (basic rewards)
    • Basic UI (Main Menu, Game, Pause and Win/Lose Basic Screens)
    • Console with main debug settings
    • Basic key controls (orders giving, camera move, hordes' in-between time jump and pause)

  • Alpha (May 19th)

    • Definitive Map with Fog of War
    • Defense Building System
    • Definitive Strategic Point Control System
    • Definitive UI with all screens
    • Basic Storytelling - Explanation through text, images and animations
    • All units & troops orders implemented, except Special ones, implemented
    • Definitive Horde System (Between 10 and 20 Waves)
    • Full key controls
    • Communist Bar
    • Full Console

  • Gold (June 2nd)

    • Well and definitive balanced gameplay
    • Special Units
    • Advanced storytelling - Explanation through cinematics
    • Waves Polishing & Balancing
    • Game polish & final details
    • Website, Trailer & Gameplay video

Risk & Contingency List

We know that working as a team implies that, sometimes, something goes wrong and we are not robots so it is a good idea to foresee future problems and have a plan in response to keep calm, know what to do and act consciously. Also, is important to leave act of how to avoid those possible problems. Let's see a Risk & Contingency List:

PROBLEM PROBABILITY PROTOCOL
Long time member Absence From previous experience, Low Probability Distribute tasks between other teammates and reintroduce the absent member as soon as possible
Short time member Absence Mid-High If the member had very important and critical tasks, same procedure than above. Otherwise, wait to him and keep working as normal
Non/Low working member From previous experience, Low Probability Normally a situation like this can be seen before coming, so Lead should try to motivate the member, talk to him, make him see that the others work more while it keeps the team efficiently working. If it insists and motivates the member, talks to him but situation continues during 1 week, first of all the tasks will be reasigned and the easier ones will be assigned to this member. If during that week the situaton continues and the communication still doesn't work, the member will be fired from all team communications and its remaining tasks distributed, working the other teammates extra time. Also, the lead aside the manager will make an evaluation on which of the member's tasks are more expendable and then, will be eliminated from the project
Weekly sprint not completed Mid The whole team will make an evaluation on which tasks are more expendable and then, will be eliminated from the project or postponed. The others can be redistributed or assigned to more than one person
Internal delivery not delivered Mid It's posed over the table in the next meeting if the date was adequate and if we must change the system of delivering
External delivery not delivered Low In the next meeting we'll talk about what happened, how to avoid to happen that again and, if there is a responsible, talk to him about what happened and how to prevent to happen again. If needed, we will make an evaluation on which tasks are more expendable and then, will be eliminated from the project or postponed
HacknPlan not used adequately Mid Pose to the team how to make the organization work and also if some system of alerts could work
Memebers not assisting to the meetings (continuously) Mid Talk to all members and change the meeting scheduling or organization
Member with low communication Low Manager and lead will try to modify this conduct by talking to the member and seek for a solution. If this affects in a big way to the team, the tasks will be re-distributed among other teammembers and the member in conflict will be assigned fewer and easier tasks
The tasks are not accomplishing as expected Mid We will make an evaluation on which tasks are more expendable and a extreme and strict priority queue will be done to ensure the next deliver basis and work extra to take the timing again
Not compiling game near a deadline Mid If the crash has been there and been studied during a long time and still has not solution, we will have two teammates working on the crash and the others we will recover the last working build to ensure the deliver and try to add what is possible by following the same procedure of the problem above
Harder to balance the game than expected High Find references on other games and work more time to balance the game. Also, we will have ready a previous version better balanced to ensure the deliver
No time for Q&A sessions High We will force external Q&A sessions with temporal builds that shows the main features of the game while we keep working

Gantt Chart

The next is a Gantt Chart of the deep planning for this project to visualize and assimilate the timing and milestones to do. Here there's a detail on the part of the Gantt Chart for the first milestone (Vertical Slice) Now here an enlargement of the Gantt Chart for the second milestone (Alpha) And finally, a zoom in of the Gantt Chart for the third and final milestone (Gold).

Post-Sprints and Meetings

Each monday we will review the previous sprint, this is the status of every task, the feedbacks of teammates for that sprint (in terms of tasks, organization and relations), and we will do a general analysis of the project status, Do we have to spend more time? Do we go well and in-time?

All meetings are registered through a record document saved in a specific folder in google drive. Those records will include the post-sprint analysis in case there are. Sprint post-mortems will be gathered here.

Sprint Post-Mortems

Sprint 1 - February 25th

The first sprint is completed, it’s been a test for the team to know how do we work and to know each other in a workspace. It lasted 6 days since in Project II the deliver was restarted for day 27th. We have a general idea for the game that needs to be polished, but it’s enough for team presentation, which is also prepared, but the general feeling is of unorganization.

Time Log & Estimation on Average Deviation

At HacknPlan, for each task, management, along with the member assigned for the task, will assign a estimated time of completion to have a general view on organization, every sprint controlled and time well distributed. When the task is finished, or whenever if the teammate wants to log time in the middle of a task to keep track of time, the total time spent will be also registered. With this, we will make a tasklist at the end of each milestone with all the timings and management will calculate the average deviations between estimated timings and real ones in order to analyse if we must improve the organization or we are going well.

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