It is important to have control over all the work when you develop games. It is easy to forget things or put work in the wrong places. That’s where scrum come in. Scrum is a framework for managing work. Within scrum there is something called sprints. These sprints are tasks that need to be completed within a certain time. Our group had one sprint every week. We had sprint planning on Monday and sprint reviews on Fridays.
On Mondays we would go through everything that had to be done for that week. On Fridays we would go through everything we have done. If something was not completed, we would put that at a high priority for the next sprint.
Working in sprints has worked very well for our group. It makes everything seem more manageable. I think it also helped us with not getting burnt out. Everyone is very excited the first few weeks and its hard to stop people from working more than they should. The sprint planning gives everyone a task for the week and if they are done they can relax and know we are still on schedule.
A couple of problems I had was that my work was very hard to put on the sprint reviews. I as a designer think about my game often and its not always effective work hours. I felt that I worked a lot during the first few weeks but then I do not have much to do. I try to help everyone with their disciplines, but I am not nearly as good as them. I do not think this is a problem with scrum, but it is just how game design works in some cases. I didn’t know what to do if everything was working and we were getting things done.
I realize now that I could have worked on a lot of things during this time. I could have worked with sound and level design. I forgot that these were things I could have worked on to be more prepared for the development that comes later in the project.
I think scrum and sprint has overall helped our workflow a lot and kept everything under control and it has been making sure we get things done.
Jesper Bergman Game Blog 