These last few weeks have been extremely hectic, both for the development team, and for myself personally. Unfortunately with COVID-19 scares and spring break, we've had to make a lot of changes to our team structure, and the game itself. Without hesitating, I'll outline those below.
First off, when leaving for spring break, we were given the option by our leads to continue to work on the game only if we had time and really wanted to. I myself used the opportunity to take a vacation in Europe, which proved to be a rather scary endeavor as the Coronavirus scare began to increase. On the Thursday during break, we got an email saying that break would be extended and all classes would be moving online. Shortly after this we received emails telling us not to go back to our university campus. Naturally as a team we tried to stay informed and communicate but everyone was in different countries and communication became difficult.
As soon as we were able, we resumed regular scrum meetings, and I think we all started to learn a lot more about communication as a team. Not just because of our distance, but because our professors were struggling with it as well through online classes. In fact, the whole world was trying to transition to remote work and communication, so it felt nice that everyone was learning together.
During this down period, our leads came up with a new system of meetings that seems to work a lot better than the old ones as well. Instead of single discipline meetings, we now only have 4 video meetings a week: A Designer/Programmer Meeting, a Designer/Artist Meeting, a Programmer/Artist Meeting, and a full team meeting. This way, there is better communication between all members of the team on requirements from other people. So far meetings have been great, although our workload has taken a heavy hit.
Unfortunately due to working and living remotely now, we've had to cut a lot of features from our game. We came to these decisions as a team, but our tutorial and second levels are being cut, some of the AI is getting cut, and some of the other player features as well. With dates being pushed around and no one really knowing the final product, we had to start making some hard decisions. This means that sadly the game won't reach the state we had envisioned when we started; not by a long shot. As a development teams we are used to cuts and setbacks, but this is a bit of a hard truth.
Speaking of setbacks, the biggest one pertaining to my role is lack of equipment. We were all using local equipment that included audio hardware and software. Now, working remotely, i no longer have access to the hardware or software needed to continue working on audio in the same way I have been. I'm not quite sure what to do moving forward, but my next tasks are going to be looking into other audio pipelines and possible solutions for the coming weeks. I'd be lying if I said I wasn't disappointed; I was really excited to showcase the music I had been working on in the game. In more of a personal note, I've been back home these last two weeks and my family just decided to sell our old house, so the only thing I've been doing has been packing up everything to move out. Its both physically and emotionally draining. I've explained my plight to my team and other professors and I think everyone understands for the most part. I wish I had more to showcase this week but everything has been up in the air, so it was more an update on my current status, and the status of the project as a whole. Hopefully we can get back on track within the next few weeks.