Teammeeting

This time I will you give some insights what we discussed in our latest team meeting.

Last Tuesday the team was meeting at my apartment in Darmstadt City. All of us were quite curious, because our new “Server Chief”, Ole was attending the first time and nobody met him in person before.  I prepared a little bit of food. Some Wiener Würschtel, fresh cut vegetables and some cake.

My bad I forgot to shoot a group picture. Instead I made a photo of my game hero collection. I thought this would be a nice metaphor for the whole team anyway. Hope you don’t mind guys, and please do not ask me who is who!!

After having a nice chat and lecker food we started the official part of the meeting. Our agenda was actually quite simple. We were tackling each subject for about 30 Minutes and then we planned to do brainstorming session for the rest of the meeting.

The first agenda point was the current state with possible investors. Because of the financial crisis a lot of investors are very anxious and were postponing decisions and meetings. So the big question was: What happens if we do not find an investor this year? Could we still work on our game, with the same intensity in the next year? Well fortunately we have a lot of clever people in the team and the answer was: Absolutely no problem! Everybody has enough opportunities for consultant work and also enough time left to work on the game. Invigorated from that news we went to our next topic..

As we talked about the upcoming art work, Chris our artist said a quite remarkable thing.

“Currently I am very pleased about the situation, I know exactly what to do next and the tools provided from the technical guys are absolutely sufficient. “

In my entire career I cannot remember that I heard this from an artist saying this in front of the technical team. That just tells me two important things. The technical team did a good job and our artist has a very solid technical understanding.  No really big news for us, but its just nice to get it confirmed this way.

Next issue was the programming part. Luckily its working out quite well at the moment, only the server part is a bit behind schedule but we are catching up now and ran our first successful tests with the Smartfox Server,  which Joerg lately introduced in his blog post.  Sure there is always room for improvement, but currently there are no impediments in sight.

Then it was Ole’s turn. After about an hour meeting, he was already assimilated. Everybody was sure, he is the perfect match for our team! Ole was discussing about his upcoming work on the server and telling us about security issues he already fixed.  We felt very satisfied afterwards, because we are sure, the server is in very good hands from now on.

Design was our next big topic. It was Rafael’s task to talk what is currently going on there and what kind of problems we are facing. The biggest issue was, that we decided, quite a while ago, to create an eye candy demo version for investors. The bad side effect was, we polished features which definitely looked nice, but did not bring more fun into the game. So we decided to leave the demo version in its current state, because its absolutely sufficient to get the idea of the game. From now on we are going to focus on the fun part of the game.

After another hour brainstorming new ideas for the game, we decided to vote for our company mantra. We were discussing the mantra for weeks in the wiki and had lots and lots of different ideas, but none of them were convincing.  Lately, Manuel posted one of his ideas into the wiki and there was one mantra, which caught everybody’s attention.  Rock the boat! Everybody loved the idea and it fits just perfect to our company title!

With a very good feeling we concluded the meeting and collected lots of new ideas, energy and motivation for the upcoming tasks.

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