Here is the first post to my new blog. I will admit, it isn’t going to be glamours. Most it will be setting up lists, prioritizing them based on subject attributes that only really matter to me at this time and working on a lot of basic setup stuff for the Project Management and the site itself. But my goal here is not to show how to begin a project. I want to record my thoughts as I progress through the creation of my portfolio site as well as the content that will go into it. Hopefully by doing so I demonstrate that I can manage a project whether it be in game development or software development. At the beginning a lot of what I will be working on is just getting my Portfolio site up and running but eventually I will be showing off my game development skills as well; such as Level Design, Quest Development, User Experience, Game mechanics design, and other technical skills. I will end up building my own level for Fallout 4 and Skyrim using their Creation Kits and a level using the Unreal 4 engine (my favorite one so far). I might even track the creation of a podcast that I want to create to build up a world I have rolling in my head but we will see if I feel that is needed down the road.
So here we g…wait…I should mention that I am writing this post pre-launch of my portfolio site to tackle a weird chicken and the egg moment I am getting. I want to show off the management work I am doing to build the site but I have no place to show the management work being done since the site that I would show it off on doesn’t exist yet. Like the universe I have nothing, so I have to document this on the side while I get the big bang ready. So without further ado…here…we…go.
What I wanted to set-up before I even touch on my little project here was to get the task tracking ready. At the school where I was taught, I learned how to build software and games using the Agile Methodology, which uses small iterative development cycles in a collaborative environment. All big words means a lot if you know what you are talking about but for everyone else: it means we work for small periods of time, that can be from anywhere from a few hrs to up to 28 days, in a place where people of different disciplines, like artists and programmers, come together to design and build the product that a client needs.
Alright so in order to begin I need to get my tracking setup. Off to Trello!
There are several task tracking softwares out there that can do the job like Atlassian Jira + Agile and Active Collab but since most of those need money to operate and I was planning to use that moolah to fund the website, I will be using Trello, a free moddable task tracking service online. It’s something that I have worked with before and that I can modify to reflect how I would run a project. Here is my initial setup of Trello. As I move forward I will add more to it like: tasks, scrum estimates, and hopefully business value estimates as well as kano, but one step at a time and that is another post.
