The participants talked about the sprint on chat and in this forum thread but let me sum up the opinions that were expressed (a few contradictions and conflicts of interest ahead ):

Positive

• The sprint was a success
• The short, regular meetings (2 per week) were motivating and increased  efficiency
• PARPGians are “Fennecs“
• Critical code that needed fixing was identified
• Trac tickets were helpful for keeping overview

Negative/Suggestions

• There were bottlenecks between departments – department-specific sprints could work better?
• Sprint target (character customization) has little importance for gameplay in early versions of PARPG – figure out higher-priority targets?
• Sprints should be shorter / contain less tasks
• More small (non-[epic] user story) tickets would have been helpful – somebody responsability for writing new tickets needs to be defined
• Subversion is hard to work with using a clean development style

Dependency Graph for Ticket #264 (Character customization based on stats and attributes) Everybody likes pictures!

Inventory Mockup by qubodup from January (tabs added yesterday)

Inventory Mockup by Q_x from January

See this thread for more details.

A week ago the sprint started and so far my feeling is: awesome! We’re all working towards finishing a feature of the game in parallel! But I’ll save it for the sprint postmortem. Let me show you this week’s mockup progress:

Mockups by qubodup from the past week

What’s amazing is how much artist effort goes into one mockup image. Check out the attribution file to see a list of all authors that made art used in these images.

Hopefully, we’ll manage to implement character creation into the game soon!

• Lack of focus on actual development goals
• Lack of agreed upon development guidelines and processes
• Lack of communication and coordination between the different development departments

Sprint prioritization meeting

Agile articles

• Agile philosophy
• Sprint prioritization meetings
• Agile glossary

Concept art sneak peek

We decided to address this problem right away and compiled a fixed installer that contains a working ActivePython URL. You can download the updated installer here: Updated PARPG Techdemo 1 installer

We recently overhauled our download article at the wiki as well. Setup instructions how to install the updated PARPG techdemo 1 installer on Win32 can be found here: How to install PARPG Techdemo 1 on Windows

Writer application process

As you might remember: we were looking for a lead writer for PARPG recently. Quite surprisingly for us, not just one but a couple of writers were interested in filling this role on the team. We considered to use a formal application process to handle this but after quite some discussion on the team we realized that giving writers a formal task to work on might not work out that well in reality due a couple of reasons.

A formal work sample will tell us nothing about the communication skills of a writer. Furthermore a work sample doesn’t really give us any idea how well (s)he can adopt established workflows or if (s)he’s interested in actually helping out with defining these writing workflows/guidelines.

Therefore we decided to invite every interested writer to spend the next four weeks with us working on the game. Writers will brainstorm with the other developers. We will develope a creative vision for the writing department together. You have the chance to contribute with your creativity by fleshing out new writing content (as proposals) or reviewing existing content and revising it with the other developers.

If you’re interested in contributing to the project as writer, please check this article at the wiki where all the details of the process are covered: Writer application process

Next news update scheduled for early February. We can hopefully tell you by then how the writer application process worked out

This is the first news update in about 5 weeks, so you must be asking yourself if we have been rather lazy lately. The good news is we haven’t We have actually been that busy that we didn’t find the time to write a news update. But now I finally found the time (and motivation) to sit down and write this damn news update. So without further ado: here’s your monthly dose of awesome PARPG news!

PARPG looking for a lead writer

PARPG is now actively looking for a lead writer. In a nutshell: our past writing efforts never took off in a consistent and structured way. When the project started, we’ve agreed upon some basic setting guidelines and wanted to leave the rest to the to be found writers. Unfortunately that process didn’t work out well in reality. Interested writers in the past mostly focused on fleshing out NPCs or proposed potential storylines for the game. At the same time, no writer was really willing to commit to fleshing out setting elements and what kind of writing themes would be worth exploring in the game. So now we’ve got loads of writing ideas (TM) sitting in the wiki but there is almost no consistency to them. Therefore we have decided to tackle the problem from a slighty different angle than in the past.

We’re looking for a lead writer who would be willing to commit to the more substantial parts of the writing process. We’re looking for somebody who is not afraid of making decisions in the fields of setting, themes to explore and storyline of the game. Obviously somebody who is familiar with the post-apocalypse genre would be strongly prefered.

If you’re interested in the details, check out the detailed lead writer advert at the wiki!

New wiki content license

Related to our new writing efforts: we’ve switched the license of our wiki content. In the past we have been using GDFL, we’ve recently switched to CC 3.0 BY-SA. The main reason is that writing content will mostly reside at the wiki first, so it makes sense that wiki writing content and ingame writing content are published under the same license. If you’re interested in the details, check out updated license article at the wiki: http://wiki.parpg.net/License

In case you want to license your former wiki contributions differently, please let us know at the forums.

GUI progess

We’ve spent a lot of time over the last weeks to flesh out how our GUI should actually work. To cover all details here would be overkill, so I’ll cheat and simply send you to the forums for details. Check out this thread where GUI discussion is still ongoing.

Updated portraits

Our favourite art-producing husky has done it again. Gaspard has updated some of his prior portraits recently, so enjoy:
Hoardir:

Jacob:

Synnove:

Massive project documentation update

The main reason why I’ve been incredibly busy lately, is that I gave our project documentation at the wiki a major overhaul. Workflows have been fleshed out, departments have a new structure, content has been categorized. This was a massive undertaking and is still ongoing. But it was really necessary because some departments were and are still in pretty bad shape. Categorizing all the existing writing content was essential as you can’t expect that interested writers wade through dozens of outdated articles without any indication what these articles are about.

As project management work is usually not considered to be the epitome of excitement, I won’t go into lenghty details. If you’re a sucker for project management and would like to learn from our mistakes, check out this article: http://wiki.parpg.net/How_to_manage_your_department

That’s all for today, next news update scheduled for February

New Python programmer on the team

We were looking for a new experienced Python programmer for PARPG, to get the project back on track. And well, we found one We’re glad to welcome Technomage on the team who already got his hands quite dirty on a bunch different tasks.

Plans for techdemo 2 fleshed out

As pointed out in the last community update in early November: we decided to limit the scope of techdemo 2 in terms of features to get the release out in a reasonable timespan.

There will be two main objectives for techdemo 2:

1. Document the current dialogue engine and extend / modify it to ease future maintenance and working with it
2. Implement basic support for character stats and character descriptions

Technomage already took care of the first task and documented the old dialogue engine at the wiki. Furthermore he even compiled a list of proposed changes to the dialogue engine that have been already partially implemented and commited to our SVN repository. There are still some bits and pieces missing, but the dialogue engine rewrite is on a good way

After all planned dialogue engine changes will be implemented, we’ll look into implementing basic support for character descriptions and primary character stats. We’re not sure at this point if the techdemo 2 release will feature a GUI for these stats, but there will be at least an (ingame console) interface to query, modify and write this data to disk.

Switching to git in discussion

We’re currently discussing the pros and cons of switching to a distributed version control system among the team. Git would be pretty much the first choice for such a system but there are some roadblocks left that we’ll need to clear before actually switching. Right now there seems to be no host who offers free of charge git hosting plus Trac integration for it for open source projects. As we use Trac for milestone planning, tickets and a couple of other of its features, Trac integration for git would be pretty much essential to us.

Anyway, if you’re interested in the details or even want to contribute to the ongoing discussion, head over to our forums where the topic is currently hotly debated.

Notebook GUI concept

As it’s often said: “pictures or it didn’t happen”. We agree that every community update at the blog should come with something fancy to look at, so there you go. Graphics artist Q_x started to work on a notebook-style GUI mockup for PARPG that will likely be used as graphical foundation for a couple of different features: character stats, journal, list of quests, etc.

Here’s the mockup for the character description and primary stats of the player character:

If you want to provide feedback on the notebook GUI mockup, feel free to do so at our forums. Anyway, that’s all for today. Next news update scheduled for mid December; prolly shortly before Christmas

The reason why I’m posting again is to report that I’ve decided to try to help to get the project back on track. I’m still sorting out my study-related problems, but things are at least on its way now so I feel more comfortable to invest at least a certain amount of time into PARPG, whenever possible.

As you may or not may know: I stepped down in March after techdemo 1 had been shipped to focus on my studies. Unfortunately I wasn’t able to find a new project manager for PARPG in the next weeks. While the developers who were left gave their best to move forward with the project, problems arose nevertheless and the project fell at least partially apart :-/

The devs who are left (Q_x, Beliar and I) discussed how to move forward with PARPG today and we decided to give the project another try with a change in scope. We’ll be focusing on the programming side of things for now until we’ve shipped a second techdemo. The reason for this is rather simple: there aren’t many developers left at this point and coordinating the work of all departments was quite complicated in the past.

So here’s the plan for now: we’ll try to get a new experienced Python programmer on board to help us in this field. While Beliar did a great job to extend PARPG in some fields, it’s simply too much work for a single programmer. We’re looking for somebody who either already has prior experience working on team projects (open source or not) or extensive solo Python programming experience. Basically someone who could provide guidance in the field due his experience. We’ve posted help wanted adverts at gamedev.net and sourceforge.net today, so hopefully somebody willing to contribute will spot these adverts

Furthermore we decided to limit the scope of techdemo 2. The second techdemo will only feature an overhauled dialogue engine and an implementation of basic primary stats for player and non-player characters. We don’t plan to add any new content for the upcoming techdemo releases besides (placeholder) art that is needed for the visualization of new features, e.g. for the dialogue engine or the primary stats of (N)PCs.

That’s basically all to report at this point. I plan to keep you updated about our progress (or lack thereof) trying to revive the project at least once a month here at the blog. In case you’re a Python programmer and would like to help us getting things rolling again, please don’t hesitate to get in contact with us.

The best way to reach us is to visit our IRC channel: #parpg, at irc.freenode.net. If you don’t have access to an IRC client at this point you can simply click on this link to join the channel in your web browser: join #parpg in your web browser.

That’s all for today, see you in December with an update concerning our efforts trying to find a new programmer.