P.I.N. Point - Sprint 6

P.I.N. Point - Sprint 6

My name is Kyle Ramser, and I am currently working as the 3D Artist on the game P.I.N. Point. P.I.N. Point is a fast paced assassin shooter that takes place in a cyberpunk city, where you use your futuristic gadgets and sniper to take down your targets as fast as possible. Our team just finished up our sixth sprint, which is our second to last sprint, and it was a very rocky one for me unfortunately. Two huge glaring issues happened during the process that ended up using up more time than I was willing to lose, and caused me to have a lower number of cards by the end than usual, which is never a good thing. For the work I was able to finish, though, I ended up being very happy with what I have.

The first major issue that occurred during the sprint was that our producer disappeared for a bit. During the latter half of the sprint, none of the group members were able to get into contact with our producer, which raised a huge issue for me since I had just run out of cards. There was a miscommunication with the cards that I had been assigned, as a few of the points that I had were already cut from the project, so I ran out of work to do very early and had to have an emergency meeting with our designer to figure out what to move onto. In the end, I got some work to do and everything worked out, but it did end up costing some valuable work time for me. We ended up being able to get into contact with our producer by the end of the sprint, and I just want to be as clear as possible that this was not the producers fault. Things happen in life and sometimes these things take time to attend to, which is what happened in this case, but I felt the need to chronicle it due to the issues that arose from it.

The other major issue was that, immediately after the first issue was remedied, I fell extremely sick, to the point that I was hardly able to get out of bed for several days. During this time, I had received new work to do, but was not able to complete any of it by the time the sprint was finished. This was not the biggest issue on the other project that I was working on, but with both of these problems together, it took me away from my work for far longer than I had hoped.

Now onto the cards that I was able to finish. Unfortunately, with everything that happened, I was only able to complete 6 cards this sprint. One of these was just an acknowledgement for completing the sprint retrospective assignment, so the cards that had real substance included the texturing of the player arms, the modeling and texturing of some building signs, and the texturing of the interior room and door frame. Out of all of these, the player characters arms took the longest, as they were the most complex pieces, and I am extremely happy with how they turned out in the end. I used carbon fiber for the triangular armor pieces, exactly like I did on the other gadgets and the sniper, and a mix of metal and several cloth types for the hands and arm to create a metal mesh fabric.

So overall, this sprint did not go according to plan. I think some planning ahead of time for situations like this would stop any problems with sickness or group members becoming otherwise out of commission. We all as a group should have had it together a bit more and did not roll with the punches as well as we could have. I’m hoping that for our next and final sprint, we can learn from the last sprint, get the game polished up, and have it in a good state by the end of the project.