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As a team, Mike, Zane, Lance, Luis and I sat down and discussed what went well with both of our chess games and what could be improved moving forward with our games. This postmortem covers Mini Chess for both February and March. Here are our notes.
Need to Keep
The initial Design Document, though a rudimentary excel file, was very helpful to stay on track
Learning to work in a team. Learning Git was the biggest help in this
Assigning roles and expectations from the start helped us define lanes of work
Everyone contributed
The casual environment – alcohol didn’t hurt!
Need to Improve
The learning curve involved with Git
A more formal upfront instruction would help to avoid GitHub issues
Protect Master branch (overall, we need to define better rules about how to contribute)
Create GitHub and Unity reference documents
The Git branch workflow
Instead of branching by person, we need to instead adhere to feature based branch workflows
With this, we need to look into Agile development processes and workflows
Orienting people. Everyone should feel like they CAN contribute. Initial planning of the project and keeping everyone on track could (and should) be ramped up and be more formal
Impart that you absolutely will contribute - continue making people feel welcome
Better design requirements will help - Use ZenHub for this on github moving forward
Better decoupling needed at some point
Create teams for certain issues so people can ask questions (Paid slack only - can not do this right now. Perhaps another IM service such as Discord is worth looking into)
Became confused and mentally finished with Chess by the end b/c we did not know what to work on next
Better Design requirements
Adherence to monthly timeline for new members
Better define what the meetings are about
Playtesting should be a bigger part of what we’re doing
Implement a Build Server (to automate builds and speed up in-person testing)
Meetups should be deliberate production conversations. People should be able to get help with something specific
Challenges and Goals
The one month timeline is challenging, but forces us to synchronize using industry standard practices and tools. Learning how to collaborate is a primary pillar. In fact, learning how to collaborate on complex software like video games is a focus that Games by Moonlight uniquely prioritizes.
