Keeping Scope in Check

This week I spent a lot of time trying to refocus our development for the next couple weeks. We took a long hard look at what we had left to accomplish and what was feasible and valuable on that list. We cut out a few different things in order to keep our end product attainable. After that I looked at cleaning up our Trello and looking at how to adjust our map.

The Trello cleanup was a big part of our pivot this week. We haven't been using it nearly as well as we should have been and it should have been groomed more after the previous sprint. Fortunately this was a good time to populate the board with our new tasks and define them better than previously. It looks like a much more manageable amount of work and is much more organized this time around.

Along with that we looked at our current level design. If we had more time to develop the project the original level would have been a very cool and engaging area to explore, however we do not have enough time to develop enough content to fill that large of a space. With that in mind we decreased the size of the yard quite a lot and along with that removed a lot of the art assets that were not yet created and would have been large amounts of effort. I think our new reduced level size and scaled down scope will allow us to create a more focused gameplay experience.

The original (left) and new (right) layouts that Steven created. Our new one has enough content and will end up feeling much less empty.