Overview

This post discusses the (sometimes not so) daily meetings we had throughout beta.

Technical Description / Explanation 

Similar to the previous two stages, beta had a lot of in-person meetings towards the start, and then slowly adapted into meetings on Teams as people got to work on their individual tasks. A lot of our meetings boiled down to "what we're doing now, any issues, and notices from Nathaniel (our producer) or me (producer when Nathaniel isn't in)". This format made meetings fairly efficient and quick, but left much to be desired in terms of more personal feedback and communication between developers on the team.

The format of our meetings didn't change much from Alpha. We were still loosely following AGILE, with beta being our third sprint since the start of our project (pre-prod, alpha being the previous two). Our meetings had devolved somewhat, boiling down to simply discussing our intentions for the day and noting them down in the meeting log. Unfortunately, a lot of the nuance for our meetings was lost to the rush that beta had caused thanks to the fact it was shorter than alpha (caused by the easter break). Still, they continue to be important by allowing us a small amount of time in the day to see how everyone has progressed and get a chance to raise issues early on without disrupting other people's workflows.

Reflection

My biggest gripe with team meetings continues to be that communication and feedback are fairly lacking. These are issues that should be addressed and discussed in our game's postmortem, as I believe they were the biggest hindrance to some of the progress we could've made. The reason I believe they were a hindrance is because their brevity and lack of detail were not very conducive for an environment where developers share progress, and given how busy our teams chat can get at times, questions about development can quickly get buried, along with requests for assets or progress of assets. This has already been addressed and will hopefully be rectified for the short amount of time left in production.