When a software project is at or near a close, a good software management team w

Question

When a software project is at or near a close, a good software management team will often meet to write up a post-mortem (literally, ‘after death’). The conversation and associated documentation attempt to capture what went well, what went wrong and what should be done in the future. Though normally this process is done as a team, for this Assignment you will complete the post-mortem as an individual.

To complete this Assignment:

Write a 350–500 word post-mortem report. The document should be created based on discussions in your team. Write the post-mortem report after the Group Assignment is complete. Your report should address the following:

What was the best thing about the project?

What was the worst thing about the project?

If you could have changed one thing, what would it have been?

Which deliverable best added ‘backbone’ to the project design?

Upload your post-mortem report to the Turnitin link for this Reflection A

Explanation / Answer

If you have any problems, let me know in the comments and i will try to solve them.

Last year we played with the idea of a cross platform game engine that focussed on usability and functionality. The decision was based on the fact that there are currently no game engine that supported our view and so we began with the project. We are now done with the prototype of the said software (still no name for it.)

We held a meeting to breakdown its functionality and what was the best thing about it at the same time the common pitfalls that occured in our journey.

It was clear from the beginning that this was an artist centric software and our approach was implementing features that not just programmers can use. It is often seen that due to the size of an indie game company, they cannot afford two or three programmers and the project takes a long time to then realize. Therefore we implemented material scripting that allowed the user (artist) to visually script the logic behind character movements and interaction with the environment, also allowing animation dope sheets and editors.

The main feature of the software is its multi tabbed interface, Instead of overwhelming the user with a all at once approach, we provide tabs for different aspect of the design process, namely coding, animation, UI and particle effects designer. This feature was a bitter sweet experience for us as such a feature had already been implemented in other proprietary softwares and our project’s functionality had to be different yet still relevant.

The challenge was the sheer amount of code that we had to port for different operating environment. A game engine is a complex tool that pack many different features and interfaces them together so they can be implemented. The project was a secret we had to keep from people before we could come up with a solid product to test out and having a small team of 5 people didn’t help the case either. The complexity of a game engine is best suited for a team of developers with larger number and therefore we had to reuse some elements of open source software and integrate and build upon that code, which was both challenging and made us question our ethics at time.

After our experience from the project, we had a basic idea of how we could have gone in achieving the design of the software a lot sooner, which was, that while we essentially were working for the implementation of the same software, we should have assigned different block of functionality between each one of us rather than just working on anything we had in the near sight. This created a lot of error on our part and made us realize the need for better management of the scope of the project.

The shader was the deliverable that added the backbone that we needed in our project. It was the most complex block of coding required and took the most amount of time. Essentially once it’s design was achieved, the rest of the project then became about interfacing the different elements together and packaging the UI.

Hope this helps...

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