Week 1

This first week of the project was mainly spent getting up to speed with the basics of Scrum, using some information found online via Google, but mainly from the book “Agile Game Development with Scrum” (Addison Wesley) by Clinton Keith.

My assignment was to come up with at least 10 user stories. I created the summary of the game and then using that created 12-15 user stories. I kind of did a “mini sprint” because the designer (me) then used those user stories to create the initial game design document. That document will now be used by the game programmer and artist (me and me, again) to create user stories in preparation for the first development sprint.

This week was spent working mostly with pen, paper, and index cards, but that’s typical of the planning stages of a game, using Scrum or not. Starting next week I’ll be spending most upcoming development time in front of the computer.

Things I’m thinking about after this week’s work:

1. How Scrum fits in with the design vs. development of a game. While I made it work, I’d like to find out from “Scrum/Game” experts how it’s typically done.
2. Whether to code or buy certain things. If an NPC needs to follow the player to attack, some sort of pathfinding will be needed (“Go from point A to point B without running into obstacles.”) While coding that could be fun, it will save time to buy a “pathfinding tool.” I’ll probably put off that decision as long as possible — if it turns out I’m fine time-wise, I can code it.
3. Will the game be any fun? While I did an Endless Runner/Word Game mashup this summer that turned out to be more fun than I expected, there’s some risk in taking a known and loved genre like a dungeon crawler and adding a casual game-type component to it.

Time spent on the project this week was about 5 hours in writing user stories and developing the design document and 2 hours reading and researching about Scrum.

Total: 7 hours.