We've talked a bit in the past about
game organization and our schedule for the future. As we move forward the game gets ever more
impressive, more real, and more fun
as we put in the things we've planned.
But let's not talk about the awesome
and impressive parts of the game that gets everyone all pumped up.
Let's talk about something that only very particular people find exciting. Let's
talk about lists. YEAH,
LISTS!!!!!!IdputinaninterrobangifIcouldfigureouthow!!!!!!
A list is sort of an atomic unit of
organization. All it really does is help you remember things—offload
a bit of brain power so your neurons can be freed up to be creative. Since we're a
remote team, our lists had to be accessible and editable
by everyone. Thank goodness we live in the future and there are many
online options.
The tool we're using is Trello. This
allows us lists in the form of information cards. I think it's
designed to be a sort of Kanban system, although our small team size
means that we don't actually have to track tasks all that much. It's
just nice to be able to pick something from the task list and,
y'know, decide to do it.
We've got a few different categories of
lists—called boards in the Trello lingo—to cover major conceptual
areas of the game. Within each, we've got categories of backlog of
ideas, things we're working on now, and what is complete.
The hardest part is actually narrowing
down the to work on. There are so many good ideas! We wanna do 'em
all! But if we tried to do everything, we'd never finish the game .
. . so instead we keep track of the ideas by writing them down on a
virtual-space list. After major milestones, we can review the list of
all the great ideas and decide which set of great ones we'll tackle
next.
Our system evolved a bit over time. We
started with the different boards for different game categories. Unfortunately
that didn't let us see the unifying theme we were working toward for
the next milestone, and also got a bit confusing when trying to pick
what to do next. So now we still have all those categories of boards,
but we also have a main list that says what we're going to do for the
next milestone.
Some folks have also started to use the
Trello boards/lists to keep track of their work at a very specific
and granular level. Probably means that lists are doing their job
helping people work. Or maybe there are just more list aficionados than
I thought.
‽
ReplyDelete