Saturday, May 17, 2008

4 Month's Later...

As evidenced by the dates on these two most recent posts, the pause in development has been significantly extended! And truthfully, what had been planned as a two week, "get everything you can done" push has evolved into a 4 month "let's make what we're already working on as high-quality as possible" extravaganza. A popular phrase among game-makers is "a late game is only late until it's shipped, but a crappy game is crappy forever".
Taking into account the changes that the Help Desk (and the CITES organization as a whole) has undergone, the longer-then-expected development cycle makes sense. We went from having 3 team members to only 2, and one of those (Nathan) was given a heap of much higher priority responsibilities. This triggered a need for me to get used to HTML, and jump into the world of training content creation (an arena I previously stayed out of). Changes of this type are rarely anticipated, even in the relatively stable world of education, but they do not always have a negative impact. Nathan and I have had a golden opportunity to inject some much-needed love and care into our Voyage to the Unknown game, and I believe that our extra work significantly contributed to it's success when it was recently released to our student staff. So there's an announcement for you; we've got one game in the can.
Additionally, Voyage to the Unknown is also nearing completion. In the interest of good project management practices, I've created a master to-do list, assigning item priorities and tentative "due by" dates. As I'll be in Salt Lake City for most of this summer, our having a clear picture of what we need to accomplish and when is going to be critical. More updates next week!

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