The big catchup.
So I just wanted to quickly explain last weeks absence, both for the blog and for the YouTube channel. So as I mentioned in the last blog, we had an internal six-month presentation to prepare for, and this actually ended up messing with our schedule quite significantly. We still did work here and there, but we put content releases on hold until we had a full weeks worth of content again, in part so we could focus on getting our pitch right.
The six-month presentation.
So being our major focus for last week, what did we actually achieve? The first thing we did in preparation was to meet with our mentor, who specialises in project management. He gave us some really good advice on how we could pitch our project, and how to best represent our future plans for investment. From this work, I compiled an enormous document, which we're calling our "epics roadmap", full of all of our high-level goals and work responsibilities. I broke these down into what are called user stories, and then further into granular tasks that we can complete one at a time. This isn't yet complete, but I'll get into why in the next section.
After completing our epics roadmap, we both scrambled to put together a presentation in time for our pitch on Friday and came up with a great set of slides for displaying our achievements to date and what we'll be doing over the next six months. Having this roadmap helped us make a nice simple graphic to pitch to the business team we were talking to. We did try to attain funding for our upcoming Insomnia Games Festival plans but unfortunately, we were beaten by some of the 20 odd teams we were competing against. We expected this though due to the amazing quality of some of the competing businesses and are far from disheartened with the outcome of the week.
Project management, Jira and Kanban.
So let me dive into detail as to why I didn't complete the epics roadmap. I created an absolutely huge list and descriptions of the majority of our business, community and development tasks, which has greatly helped me visualise a clear plan for the future. Within the development section, however, it became apparent rather quickly that I would really like to be able to visualise certain aspects of this plan, as well as be able to track progress in real-time. Something that our mentor had mentioned was that he wanted to show us their project management tool, and loosely explained to us the concepts in how they break-down and manage their projects. This gave me the confidence to go ahead and do some of my own research in how we should tackle this ourselves to accelerate our progress in this regard.
Initially, my first thought was to convert the roadmap into a Trello board, but this would only solve part of my needs for visualisation, and didn't address my want to create an actual live roadmap, which we had to do manually for our presentation. This led me to do research into the project management software world, which I'll admit was very overwhelming at first due to the options available. I explored my options thoroughly but kept on coming back to a package called Jira, which has recently received a rework to be a bit more streamlined and is very popular within the software development space. Jira just covers all of my requirements without too much bloat and supports functionality similar to Trello's card system. Out of the box, it has a roadmap feature, time management tools, dependency visualisation and offers a solid framework for following the Kanban methodology.
Collaboration moving forward.
I have written about Kanban in a bit more detail in the last article, so go there quickly and then come back for more context. I will say the formalisation of our work process has me really optimistic about the direction the project is moving in. It opens us up to be able to work more collaboratively while staying on a clear path towards release. With team management being an extended focus of managing the project this way, it has also opened up the possibility of bringing on additional team members should we so wish in the future (something I am extremely excited about).
To deliver on the speed of collaboration on the IsoEngine that we are looking for, we are also hooking in version control to the UE4 project this week, and this is almost complete. We are working through some issues regarding UE4 versions being incorrectly conflicting on Matthews' install, but we aim to fix this over the next couple of days. Once working, and once we have grown used to this new workflow in conjunction with Jira, multiple new features should be able to be built every week, with input from us both, bringing code and design elements together rapidly.
Community plans.
Having the six-month review and building the roadmap really helped us evaluate our entire plan over the course of the year, and we have some exciting plans regarding some of the things I've spoken about already. One such plan is community feature voting. One thing Jira supports is that people, even those external from the development team can submit support requests, and we may use this or another polling solution to have community members suggest and vote on features for the game. This would really help drive our company goals to have close interaction with you guys and helps foster a relationship that ultimately makes the project better.
Due to the increasing workload, we are looking into bringing in a community manager who would offer support with said feature voting, as well as greater social media engagement (something that has become rather lacking recently due to time constraints). We are currently talking to someone about this, but we aren't sure yet if the fit is right for both us as a team and them as an individual, so I'll say no more about who it is or if they'll actually be joining until we have something concrete planned.
Another small thing I will mention is that we are considering moving away from Wix and investing in a more official website, which we will be able to use as a central location for all of our content. This decision comes as a result of needing more flexibility and professionalism with the build-up to Insomnia and our Kickstarter campaign. Initially, it will be little more than a landing page with links, but will steadily grow over time. It also allows us to secure domains and copyright in one swoop for a number of important names for the project and company.
The prop system.
So let's finally talk about some of the development work that's taken place this and last week. Some really exciting news about all of the prop work that has been going on so far is that it's finally usable! You can place fully modelled and material props in the scene, layer them up to make nice prop clusters and delete them where necessary. It uses the same system for placement that the voxel system does, with the added feature of a surface placement mode. This equates to being able to look at a surface within your placement range and the selection point snapping to that location. Really helpful for placing surface props and making adjustments to surface terrain.
In terms of how it's implemented, I've made sure that props take up a "volume" in the voxel system so that AI in the future can use it to navigate around objects rather than get stuck on them. It also allows you to select a prop in the editor based on its physical volume and not it's origin voxel, which is a great quality of life feature. Matthews' models are finally in too, with a pine tree, selection of rocks, a water well and a test character mannequin. It all looks really nice and fits our chosen design style very well!
Saving and loading was also a surprise feature that made it in last minute, borrowing heavily from our voxel code. A very easy conversion after fixing a few small bugs that came up during the process. I also hooked it into the controls with relative ease, so now props and voxels can be saved and loaded with the click of a button respectively. Multiple saves are something that will be investigated as soon as it becomes necessary so that I can focus on more important issues in the meantime.
Fin.
There has been a lot of administration this and last week, so that has been the main focus of this weeks update. I hope you can see the utility of it all, and don't think it has taken too much away from our development work. I'm really pleased with our output on both fronts given our time constraints, and I hope the foundation that we are laying now really ramps up productivity in the future. Over time, gains in this respect should climb slowly and be more than worth the investment, especially as the company grows from our two-person team.
If you would be interested in supporting the project or learning more, please look through our selection of resources or get in touch on YouTube or through this site and we'll respond in whatever way we can. Thank you, everyone, for the support and words of encouragement so far, and I hope you have a great week. See you next time!