ARGH COLLEGE COURSEWORK!!

sorry about the disappearing act everyone

When we started the group off, we already decided that the game was going to be an RPG, we then set about all making our own brainstorm as to what features would be good inside the game, these ranged from how the skills system was going be done, to the scripting engine. Nothing much really about the storyline, as people tend to get caught up in them a bit too much, so we decided to leave that until the end, when the game was finished, so even without a story to it, we still had something to release and say "we did it"

After that each person used their personal ISP webspace to put work they were making for the game so all of the team had access to it, some of the contents included a kind of .plan file, containing what we were doing, what we'd already done, and what we were going to be doing next, along with points that need to be discussed at the next IRC session.

The .plan file system involved the whole team checking everyones plan file once a day, taking note of any new entries and working on any 'issues' people had with their section of the game development.

We had an IRC meeting once every week to discuss progress, this is probably where we failed, as once a week was not enough really, twice a week would be about a bare minimum, and as we lived in differing time zones by half a day with some people, discussions with the whole team were difficult, so we resorted to email and offline ICQ messages, which didn't pay off and things went from bad to worse as people ended up waiting on other people who weren't comitted, etcetc. Me, I was clock watching waiting for someone in death valley to send the minimal specifications for the scripting engine I was going to implement, that never came, so I was left completing that myself, and ensuring that the project admin had the design. Someone else got on with making a mock up rendering system which we saw screenshots of, but never saw the code.

Communication with the team is definitely the key, plan and todo files, regular IRC meetings, email and ICQ/MSN through the week, logs of all the meetings for people who can't attend.

All we need is the project genre