New Workflow Management

This might be more interesting for the game developers reading this, and maybe not as interesting for those non-game devs. In that case, here's a picture of a cute puppy to make sure you want to keep reading:

So. Today I'm going to talk about project management, how we've completely changed the way we're doing it here at Clever Endeavour, and what we've learned in the process. We haven't been using the new system for a long time now (see: a week), but the lessons learned in exploring different softwares and different techniques remain valid.

There is a ton of great software out there for project management: Jira, Trello, Asana, Axosoft, Jixee.. just to name a few. This stuff tends to have details, options, compatibility with other software, movable and draggable and saveable and starable stuff. This is cool and all, but what do we really NEED?

At Clever Endeavour, here's what we need:

• See a big backlog of all the stuff we need to do
• Know what we need to discuss next
• Know what we need to be working on next
• Know what we should work on in this sprint (using Agile)
• Archive what was done and track how long we estimated for tasks vs how long they actually took
• Have a place for resources and things we might have to look at once in a while

Pretty basic stuff, right? We decided to go the simple route, and use a software called WorkFlowy. It's basically a text editor, with nested items. That's pretty much it. You can add hashtags and search by hashtag, and you can add people (@rich, @kyler, @alex) and then see what lines were associated with those people. This is what it looks like:

Each of those dots with the light grey circle around it means there are sub-tasks or lines nested under it. This way we have everything in one place, and it's simple and clear. No bells and whistles, but no functionality missing either. 

Most importantly, we've changed our morning stand-ups to "morning reviews" where we look at the Inbox (used to put things that we need to discuss or anything that takes more than 2 minutes to do and doesn't have a place in our WorkFlowy) and we look at our tasks from the previous day, then write down how long it took to do those tasks. 

What did we learn?

In shifting from our old system to our new system, we learned a few things. We learned that simplicity is key, and that the simpler something is, the easier it is to access information. This is important for keeping everyone up to speed. We also learned that we had been doing the daily stand-up the wrong way. We followed the instructions that you hear about from the usual Agile articles and books, but it wasn't getting the job done. We were talking but it wasn't helping us actually get on the same page and it wasn't helping us track and estimate the amount of time taken to do our tasks.

So far it's working really well, we'll see what the future brings!

TL;DR

• Simplicity is key
• Everyone needs to be on the same page and buy in to the system
• Big fancy software is useless if you're not already well organized
• Use software according to your needs, not to what's popular

Also, in case you're looking for online updates to Ultimate Chicken Horse, you can use our Steam forums to check out the newest fixes from the last update, and see the list of known bugs here. We're also planning another update soon, check our Twitter to stay in the loop!

Our GDC Experience & Online Updates

Hello people of the internet! Our deepest apologies that we seem to have been M.I.A. for a little while. There were two major factors that led to this: first, two thirds of us were at GDC (Game Developers Conference) in San Francisco all of last week. Second, we’ve been working on getting the online Beta more playable, and it’s been a ton of work. Let’s talk about it in that order… if you just want to hear about the online updates then skip down!

GDC

GDC was awesome. GDC is always awesome. It was our second time going, and this one was equally action packed and equally tiring, but a little less stressful. Unfortunately we had to leave Alex home to keep working on the game, and Kyler and Rich (the one writing this) went to San Francisco.

Our goals for this year’s conference were pretty varied. They included:

• Meeting with companies from other countries to figure out ways to make our game known in places like Korea, Japan, China, Brazil, and Turkey
• Talking to publishers about future games
• Meeting other game developers to continue to grow our network and to find new ideas and solutions to some problems we’ve had
• Meeting with some press to show them our game
• Having fun!

Going to try to keep this short, cause falling asleep at your desk is frowned upon in our culture. The show had a huge focus on VR this year, and it seems like every project that comes up is also in VR. This might seem like a fad now, but Kyler is convinced (and I’m almost convinced) that it’s here to stay.

Image taken from GDC16 official pictures.

Another big highlight was a talk given by Russ Pitts from Take This Inc. about “Depression-Proof Studio Culture”. This talk was about how to deal with mental health issues in the workplace and how to create an environment that is conducive to helping people with issues like depression, anxiety, etc. In the video game world, there’s a disproportionate number of people with these kinds of issues and so far we haven’t done a very good job helping out.

This was the only picture I found of his talk...

Some of the things that quite obviously contribute to these problems:

• Crunch time and crazy working hours, especially without additional praise or compensation
• Lack of sleep as a result of these things
• A space where mental health is seen as “not a real problem” and the common symptoms of depression and anxiety are attributed to personality traits
• Working in dimly lit, crummy locations or situations

Many of the talks were great and were inspiring, but this one was an extremely important one, especially for a small studio that plans to grow and needs to know how to create a safe space to talk about these kinds of issues.

Image taken from GDC16 official pictures.

It’s really a great thing to be able to talk shop with people from all around the world doing all sorts of different projects. At every party (see: each and every night), there were great people to meet and new perspectives to be learned. There was certainly a lack of sleep throughout the week / weekend, but waking up each morning knowing that we had GDC to look forward to made it all seem, well, possible.

Some other cool highlights, outside of the actual conference, included the “Musée Mécanique” (or mechanical museum) which housed a ton of really old school arcade games, all the way back to the mechanical machines that were used in the first arcades.

We also went to the exploratorium, where we explored. A lot. It’s basically a ton of interactive mini-exhibits relating to science in some way; some were phenomena of electricity and magnetism, some of optics and illusions, some of interpersonal interactions and social issues. Here are a couple of pics of an awesome spherical mirror and a piece of glass / mirror that allowed Kyler and Rich to combine themselves.

Online Work

We’ve been working on the online multiplayer portion of the game for the last little while, and have seen some steady progress. We pushed a new build of the game into the “OnlineBeta” branch on Steam, so players can play around with that. Keep in mind port forwarding is still needed to set up the game, but the major changes can be seen on our Steam forums: check out the fixes here and the list of known bugs here.

If you find anything that isn't on the list of known bugs, please let us know by filling out the bug report form! Again, thanks for the patience while we get it sorted out :)

How much does it cost to go to PAX South?

Hey there world,

Today's blog is a breakdown of what we spent to go to PAX South, and is meant to help other game developers to budget themselves when going to trade shows. We'll also talk about what we think we got from the show, and what we could have done better. Worth it? Totally... read on.

So first off, how much does it cost to go to one of these shows? We were two people coming from Montreal, Canada, and here were our costs.

The flights we got had one layover of about an hour on the way there, and the same on the way back. In reality Richard missed his first flight because of customs issues and took 19h to get there, and the flight home was delayed so we missed our connecting flight and stayed overnight in Dallas..... but the idea was one layover. 

We stayed at the Red Roof Plus in downtown San Antonio, about a ten minute walk from the convention center. It had everything we needed, and it was really well located.Transport refers to taxis and Ubers going to the hotel from the airport and back, and we had underestimated because we thought there would be a shuttle downtown from the airport. Travel insurance was super cheap, we got from Manulife here in Canada. The only other show cost we had was buying batteries for our controllers which ran out of batteries super quickly. 

What did we get out of going to PAX? Well if you saw our Pictures from PAX South post, you would see that our booth was super busy, which was great for testing and to see how much people were enjoying the game. We got some great press coverage as well at the booth, like this PC Gamer video, and we had some mega YouTubers and Twitch streamers come by and play the game.

We also had a presence on the Twitch stage, which had panels and games on rotation throughout the show. The event was being livestreamed on the Twitch channel, which is pretty massive, but we also had a lot of people come by the booth after saying they saw the gameplay live from the Twitch stage. The stage was also a great place to hang around and try to meet streamers... Rich met some big Twitch personalities just hanging out in the area. 

The way we did PAX was pretty efficient, in our opinion. Richard wandered a bunch doing the business development stuff he does, and Alex manned the booth most of the time. You'd be surprised how easy it is for one person to man a booth constantly full of 20 people, depending on how easy the game is to understand.

Anyway all in all, great show and great experience.

TL;DR
 PAX isn't cheap, look at the cost table!
Got great feedback on the game at the bustling booth
Got good press because of show presence
Met some big YouTubers and streamers who will help the game sell when it's out

See you next week! We're getting close to launch! Stresstimes!