Production Process

Overview

In the echoes, students collaborate in cross-functional teams to develop games using a lightweight indie studio model. However, while day-to-day operations focus on game design and development, echoes is, fundamentally, a class. Students participate in order to learn. Students are never expected to join a team already having all the skills they’ll need to succeed. Processes, project plans, and task assignments take into account a consistent need for onboarding, while also incorporating feedback cycles to ensure that mistakes have minimal impact.

Similarly, while VIPs are long-term projects that encourage participation across several semesters, students’ time is never infinite. They have other classes, work, personal commitments, and, eventually, graduation. While this is a class and consistent engagement is expected, students should never feel compelled to crunch, work “for free”, etc.

The echoes production process is engineered to not only survive these constraints, but also to embrace them by:

• Capturing key information (task progress, design rationale, etc) consistently and transparently
• Including time & mechanisms for knowledge transfer and onboarding in all activities
• Encouraging mentoring & personal growth
• Respecting student schedules and external commitments by minimizing overhead and supporting asynchronous and virtual communications

Team Communications

Meetings

We hold a single All Hands meeting each week, which is recorded for those who can’t attend. Each subteam also meets at least twice a week.

Discord

All teams use the internal team Discord server as their primary asynchronous communication mechanism. The expectation is that everyone will use it to keep their team up to date and respond to any messages within 24 hours (perhaps a bit longer on weekends and holidays).

Although dedicated channels exist for specific topics, everyone is encouraged to provide feedback in any channel and suggest the creation of new channels as needed.

Task management

All teams leverage GitHub Projects to plan and track progress. For more information about the echoes task management process and infrastructure, see https://github.com/rit-vip-echoes.

Documentation

The expectation is that teams will document as they go. There is no expectation of “pages and pages” of text for every task, but we do want to capture enough information that future stakeholders have what they need, where and when they need it.

• High-level information relevant to all stakeholders that changes infrequently is documented here on the echoes website.
• Project plans, tasks, technical how-tos, and development artifacts are documented and managed in GitHub.
• Internal information, such as team rosters, design documentation, meeting notes, etc., is stored in a Google Shared Drive.

Production Team