Project Specification, Schedule, Milestones, and Member Assignments
Due Monday, April 10, at 10pm
The first stage of the quarter is to specify your project, define a schedule and a set of milestones, and assign members to the various components of your project.
Your specification should cover the following topics:
- Project Description
- What kind of game are you planning to build?
- What are the goals of the game, how do players win, how do they lose?
- What are the interesting or unique aspects to your game?
- What are the list of features of your game? Prioritize them into at least three categories: "Must Have", "Would Be Really Nice", and "Cool But Only If Ahead Of Schedule".
- Group Management
- What are the major roles in your group's management?
- How will decisions be made? By leader, consensus?
- How will you communicate? Email, meetings in the lab, discussion board?
- How will you know when you're off schedule, and how will you deal with schedule slips?
- Who will produce the weekly group status reports?
- Project Development
- What are the development roles and who will handle them?
- What tools will you use?
- How will you do testing?
- How will you do documentation (both internal group documentation as well as external player documentation)?
- Project Schedule
- Define a set of milestones with a specific definition of what each milestone is, what it means to complete each milestone, and when you expect to complete them. Define the milestones at two scales, a high level set of key milestones like integration and design freeze, and a low level set of weekly milestones.
Like everything else in this course, you want to do this job only once. Of course, everything you plan now will be changed as reality imposes itself, but the more seriously you take the planning now the more productive you'll be at getting it done. Do not think of this as just another course makework assignment. This is something that you should feel in your soul is an integral part of building your system. It is your blueprint for a successful project for the quarter.
Please post the informationo on your group Web page and send us mail when it is available.
For examples to help make the tasks in the initial assignment more concrete, some relatively recent specs are:
and also see the schedules for the following projects:- Full Feather Jacket (2010)
- Team Ultra Autotron Sigma Star Electric Boolagoo (2007)
- Mars AtTACK! (2004)
- Team Vertigo (2002)
Send mail if you have any questions.