What an interesting week this has been. Revelations, realizations, working hard, hardly working, demo reels, and War Pigs.
We went through two major turning points this week. We realized that the Green Mountain Game Festival was on the 22nd, and we weren't happy with where we were in relationship to this event that starts in 15 days. So we decided that we wanted to change that. I spent several hours creating a plan and a Gantt chart to go with it, ran it by our team leads, and got it approved by them with some minor tweaks, mostly the prioritization and time commitment of artistic ventures. These tweaks were discussed and accepted with some insisting from myself-a compromise was quickly reached between character and environmental art time commitments.
We also received an email from our executive producer. The basics were that we needed to remind ourselves that we're in a class here, and we need to meet the requirements of the class while still producing a high quality product. We let paperwork fall to the wayside, and it built up. This is not a good thing to do, and we're suffering for it. I had been dealing with securing an internship-without an internship I don't graduate- and hadn't even logged hours for two weeks. Not an excuse, but at least a reason. That stops now. As a group, between getting this email and 8pm that same day, our task list expanded by 15%.
I had worked very hard on the wrong things. I spent a lot of time working on a graphic for our team- time I could have spent organizing the wiki and chiliproject. I reorganized my priorities and spent an hour just fixing the task board alone. We established new standards for the recording of time, namely the creation of "Administrative Columns," one for blogs, meetings, testing sessions, and project management software/wiki organization. These should help make it easy for people to log their time in an effective manner.
The production meeting was very informative this week. I learned that using the rift from the famous Black Sabbath song 'War Pig' on my demo reel may not be the best idea. Oh, the humanity! I may create a gag version just for laughs. May. Probably won't.
