Week 5 Meetings

Week 5's come around and we've had our group meeting and meeting with our supervisor today. We evaluated our work from last week as a group and slightly modified a few designs and discussed what else we needed to do in the upcoming week. We also started to discuss some of the non-functional requirements. I'll be setting out more tasks to each group member over the next few weeks so we can get a heap more done. I'm also thinking of holding project work time on Tuesday in our spare time to have time where we can collaborate on project aspects.

Project Progress

We've been making some good progress, having just completed (my) crash course in Subversion, we're all equipped with the know-how to start collaborating properly ;) Ryan's made up a beautiful user manual skeleton, and I've put together a technical manual stub document. Vince's designed us a battle system including the interface, and Adam's hard at work on designing the game's menus, interfaces and flow of control.

Tomorrow's our next (and biggest so far) meeting and we'll be pressing on with our requirements and getting these things more formalised.

On a lighter note, I drew up some quick caricatures of each of us for the members page on our website. I think the guys will like :D

Muddy start to the week

So due to the flooding in Albion Park I couldn't make it to our planned Tuesday Subversion crash course so that has been rescheduled to the following Tuesday (29th March.) The meeting today went really well and for once we actually started to get into detailed project plans. We've started designing and prototyping the various interfaces and exploring our options for the user interfaces and we're starting up some documentation. The website is looking good. We probably won't do much with it except link in project artefacts as they are produced.

Project planning

I can't say I've ever been in charge of a project of this scale, so divvying out workloads without overburdening anyone or not getting things done quickly is going to be a game of balance. Right now I think what we've got is pretty good but we can work harder and get more done. I've recently been working on the project website, and it's looking fairly good now. At least from my point of view, a non-web developer :P

Website & more project management.

So pretty much all of tonight I spent doing project management and the website. I did up a quickie with a creative commons licensed CSS stylesheet & Python cgi backend and tested it out locally with Apache. It works out pretty nice and I uploaded it to my webserver. You can see it here.

I also now have a second blog for AlphaLogic which is for project-related information-- meeting minutes, project information, etc. etc., to keep those things transparent and accessible too.

Up on there is our first two meeting agendas and outcomes (minutes) so you can see that we're actually doing work!

Preparing for our next meeting.

It's our second weekly meeting coming up tomorrow and gratefully I have Tuesdays off so I can get stuck into some good ol' preparation. We also have our first weekly meeting with Luke, and luckily all the times sort of managed to fit together well. Luke had to shift his consultation times around a bit for us though! But thankfully that wasn't a problem.

So our last meeting was basically an introduction to our project-- I talked about who we were ("AlphaLogic") and what we were going to do, and how we were going to do it--fitting into the timeline, etc. It wasn't just me talking though, we had a good discussion about the overall project timeline and a broad overview of our project's core components. I think by the end of the meeting everyone knew how the weekly meetings were going to work, they knew what was expected of them, both in terms of out-of-uni communication and workloads, and generally what direction this project was going to head in.

This next meeting tomorrow is going to be some more in-depth planning, discussing in concrete terms what we're going to do, and when. I will be making some deadlines for certain aspects of the project so that we keep the ball rolling from week to week. I will be assigning tasks to every member and following up on them in the next meeting.

I personally think that our project is very interesting which makes us a prime candidate for students without a group yet to target us. So I have a feeling that either I'm going to be turning away a few people (I really only want people who are enthusiastic, and if they don't have a group by the fourth week how enthusiastic can they be?) or maybe accepting another member if they meet the criteria. What I don't want to happen is someone to be lazy (or ignorant) and get assigned automatically to our group that doesn't want to do what we're doing (either idea-wise or workload-wise) -- it's going to make it harder for us and it definitely won't be the optimal choice for them.

More later,

Jordan

A journey of a thousand miles..

..is fortunately not what I'm doing. I'm not really an outdoors-y person..

But nevertheless CSCI321 will surely be a journey and it all starts here: in diaries.

Welcome to the blog of Jordan Trudgett, the leader of the AlphaLogic group in CSCI321 Project.