Date Range: 01/16-24/2019
Hours Spent: 6
Overview/Introduction
This week was focused on developing and organizing high level ideas that will define the scope of our project in addition to putting together the technical infrastructure necessary for managing the development of the project itself over the next 9 weeks. As a team we discussed the general concept of the experience we will be building before breaking out individually to develop some initial conceptual designs, gather research, and flushing out key features.
My contributions over the past week involved the consolidating and organizing ideas from team brainstorm sessions, designing and developing the project logo, helping prepare elements of the technical infrastructure our team will be relying on throughout the semester, and defining primary and secondary roles of each team member.
Our team has already shown a lot of passion for Kendo School and have been sharing a myriad of creative concepts, innovative ideas, and challenging technical goals. I've been trying to catalog our many suggestions into a single document that we can reference as we complete the project proposal document and as a source of potential stretch goals that we may consider implementing into the final product, given we have the time to ensure it will meet our own quality standards.
One of my first tasks, that arose during an initial brainstorming session, was to design a logo and tagline/slogan for the project. Given the project's roots in Japanese language and martial arts, I naturally gravitated towards incorporating those elements into the logo design. I quickly put together a rough mock-up of our project name, Kendo School, in Japanese characters and used a colour combination of white and red which is common throughout Japanese culture and can be seen on their national flag. Finally, given that the core experience of our project will take place inside of virtual reality with 3D elements, I decided to give the logo a 3D look as well so we have the option to model it into our scene later. The final result came quickly but seems to be widely accepted by my teammates and I look forward to seeing how it may evolve as we get further into developing the experience itself.
I was also involved with setting up an initial project backlog in Trello before migrating it over to GitHub Projects. Braeden has the most experience working in Github so we'll be organizing some team info sessions to get everyone comfortable with using the platform before diving into production.
Lastly, after some discussion with the team, I've laid out a team profile based on each individuals skill set, preferences, and experience. It goes without saying that each team member will be involved in all facets of this project at some capacity but or the purposes of team organizations and task management I have define two distinct roles for each person. The team role designations are as follows:
- Matthew Donoghue: Project Manager + Software developer
- Christa Buttera: Lead 3D Artist + UX Designer
- Hannah Perks: Lead UX designer + 3D Artist
- Braeden Timlin: Lead Software Developer + UX Designer
Challenges
Our team has been working well together so far and I don't see that changing within the near future, if at all. We had some minor miscommunications around delegating and completing certain tasks but I am confident that these issues will be avoided in the future now that we have clear roles defined for each member of the team. As Project Manager, it will be my responsibility to ensure that our team can work with each other throughout the entire duration of this project with respect, humility, and understanding.
Successes
I believe that there have been two great successes from the past week of working as a team for the first time. First, after only sharing a few ideas for what this project could be we quickly rallied behind Braeden's concept of what would come to be known as Kendo School. Despite having no prior experience working together as a team, We were able to share ideas and build off of each other's creativity that makes me optimistic for what we will be able to create. Second, I was surprised and delighted how well my initial logo design as received by the group and how constructive their feedback was when suggesting changes or simply offering their opinion.
Next Steps
We have plenty of work ahead of us before we can even dive head first into bring Kendo School to life but I am eager to get started. I believe we have found a great team in one another and I will be drawing on my experiences from my past coop as a project coordinator/manager to help keep our team organized, focused, and cooperative as we engage on this exciting new chapter of our academic careers.
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