The Stand-Up Revisited

Hello friends!

A while ago, I (Richard, business dude and one of the designers at Clever Endeavour Games) wrote an article about the daily stand-up meeting in Agile Management and some tips on doing it right vs. doing it wrong. The conclusion was, as usual, that there's no solved formula for how to do it and it depends on team size, the dynamic of the employees, the goals of the stand-ups, etc.

Today I wanted to present the "stand-up" that we do at Clever Endeavour Games. We practice a relatively agile (like a young gazelle) management style of production. Our morning stand-ups take place in the form of "Inbox meetings" which happen at 11am, one hour after we get to work. The Inbox is a place in our project management software where we put any idea, thought, discussion, issue, etc. that we want to deal with but needs the input of the whole team. We put them there during the day, and discuss them in the next Inbox meeting; if they're urgent then we'll interrupt work to discuss them.

So every morning, we look at the Inbox and we discuss what needs to be discussed. If it takes more than a few minutes to deal with, we make it a task and put it into our sprint or discuss it in a separate meeting. The meeting usually takes about 20 minutes or less, and gets us up to speed on all the new things that have come up, avoiding a longer meeting on Mondays.

We also discuss what we're up to during the day if it's unclear, but seeing as our team is only 4 people it's not as necessary to discuss it each day because we usually have a good idea already of what others are working on. 

I found that the traditional "stand-up" didn't do much for us, and there was a need for this sort of review of new issues that have come up. The issue with the traditional stand-up was that the team didn't find the discussion of what happened yesterday to be relevant or useful, and we still do the "what's happening today" portion of it. 

Personally, I think there is some use in having the discussion of what was accomplished yesterday because it helps people feel proud of their work, and makes them accountable if they didn't get anything done. Then again, it puts a lot of pressure to be done tasks by the end of the day, and that may or may not be positive. To be determined!

Anyway just wanted to share my thoughts on this and see if the community had different experiences or what they thought of the stand-up.

Working on a new Lobby System

Hi everyone! 

This week we wanted to share with you some of the early progress on our new lobby system that should help make matches more fair, more reliable, and more enjoyable. As it stands, the lobby system allows a player to create a lobby, and that lobby shows up on a list for other players to see and join. Once in the lobby, the host has control of the rules and then the game starts with those rules when enough players have joined. 

This is all well and fine, but we felt like for the long-term success of this game we needed to implement a more robust system that allows players to see more information about the game they're about to enter.

With the new lobby system, players will be able to see the region, the type of game mode, round limit or length limit, and the "health" of the lobby. This health is related to the connection strength and region, but also to player skill.

This does not mean we'll have skill-based matchmaking (like in a game like Rocket League), but it should help to make games slightly more fair by estimating the skill of the players behind the scenes and baking that into an overall "health" score.

We're going to have to test it quite a bit before we roll it out, and might make it public along with some other changes, so there's no guarantee of how quick you'll see it in-game. Regardless, we wanted to share our progress with you and let you know what you have to look forward to for the future of Ultimate Chicken Horse.

New Employee, Bug Fixing, New Block Sneak Peek!

Hello friends!

Every month, on the third Thursday of the month, we do a big update to our newsletter subscribers, Kickstarter backers, etc. We’ll loop our blog readers in with the same info to update you as well about the company and about the game, Ultimate Chicken Horse.

As you may have read last week, we’ve expanded! We’re excited to introduce you to Ben, our newest programmer addition.

Also, in case you weren’t aware, we recently had our game discounted as part of the Steam Summer Sale at the end of June, and it did really well! The discount helped us make a ton more sales than usual, and our community is growing and becoming stronger. We’ve got about 250 active users at all times which is pretty impressive for our scale of game and the number of sales we’ve made, and we expect that to continue increasing as we continue to add content and fixes to the game.

Speaking of which, what’s going on in the game?

The first (not very obvious) thing is that we’re constantly making updates which make the online play more stable and make the connections more reliable. We’re getting toward the end of the bugs with the online play, and will start to add more content once those bugs are all squashed. Part of the complication arises from the fact that the problems are sometimes server-based, sometimes based on a player with a poor connection, and sometimes due to mistakes that we’ve made, but it’s hard to know the cause of some of the issues we’ve been seeing.

Next thing we’ve been working on is some Twitch integration with the game, which will allow Twitch streamers to better interact with their audience, and vice versa. The Twitch integration is part of the bigger Sandbox Mode plan but it’s been Ben’s first task and looks like it’s going to be really fun to play around with.

Despite focusing most of our energy on streamlining the online experience, we have started a bit of new content, and here’s a super super early teaser for one of the next block / platform concepts. It’s actually getting close to finished, but this was an early sketch and we won’t reveal too much until our next big content push (cause mystery is appealing ya know?).

We’re hoping we can blow through the rest of the bugs pretty quickly, and we’re excited to get into more production and work on the Sandbox Mode. Then will come console ports, and we should start working on our next game at the same time.

Next week might be an article, might be a quick update, we’ll see where we’re at!