Week 1 - Dev Log - Forming

Having shared similar interests with Paul in past projects and the use of Unreal Engine, Paul reached out quite early to see if I would like to start a Team. To say I felt relief was an understatement as although I feel like I have a pretty good relationship with the group through our many interests and discussions on our Discord Server I didn't really know where to start. Not going in with an idea of what I wanted to do or who I really wanted to work with. The forming of the team certainly eased the pressure especially when Nick and Elliot both expressed interest in working with us.

Even in an environment where there is a commonality in what we are learning and our capabilities, I am still struggling with impostor syndrome. Needless to say, our team came together pretty quickly and later became complete with the introduction of James.

Our first initial meeting happened just before the module as we discussed the themes and possible ideas. I would say this helped to get the ball rolling and once the Module had started and James joined the team it felt easier to get started with a few seeds of ideas that we had previously researched.

Nick had requested to take leadership of the team and I thought this was a really good idea. I have liked what Nick has done in past projects; his organisation and thorough work ethic would make for a great project lead/producer. I thought that this would be good stability for the team to have somebody that will keep us in check and ensure that we're looking at all avenues and open up really good discussion points about what we intend to do. The rest of the team's roles will naturally fall into place as we discuss further our personal and team goals.

We have team members in London, Birmingham, Glasgow, Liverpool, and Dublin. Therefore we needed to discuss our schedule quite early as some members have full-time jobs and different work schedules and times. Formalising a work schedule so everybody would know when people would be available seemed like an important thing to get out of the way early on. It was crucial that all of the team didn't feel that you would have sick to the times but it would help guide us when planning later down the line.

Communication is key so Nick suggested using JIRA and Confluence. I have not used this before, having mainly used Trello and Miro. I am aware that Jira is much more widely used in Game Dev so I'm interested in learning why it is so popular and how to use it effectively.

Our main form of communication will be Discord. We already use this a lot and have done so through previous modules, so setting up a private channel for the team that we can then invite our supervisor to join seems like the sensible choice. All the team members are happy to use this and it feels like we can maintain a much more flexible communication throughout the week.

Looking at my previous experience of using my Miro, I thought that this would be a good idea to use to help keep a good visual record. And also having a communal. Workspace like a huge whiteboard that we could all add work, edit, and run through during our meetings. Nick's introduction to confluence, which is more formal, is also really useful as we can add all our research, meeting notes, and documentation. Minutes from all meetings will be stored and this will provide the team with a great overview each week.

We all showed a great deal of Interest in the starting point of Alzheimer's for the project, we also discussed wanting to create a game. This seemed to get everyone fired up and the week was set for the team to go and do some research around the subject matter so that we could take part in ideation sessions during our next meet-up.

Confluence week 1 meeting notes

https://unreal730.atlassian.net/l/c/nZxczTCF