Scheduling and Team LiveFire

Term three is winding down and I am looking forward to my break.

I may have mentioned that I have never worked this hard in my life. I know, I know—you hear that from people and it's easy to dismiss it, but I can quantify the claim for you by describing my average weekly schedule.

Here goes.

I have between seven and nine classes every week. Each class is scheduled for three hours, with a handful habitually only reaching the 1.5-2 hour mark, providing lab time for the remainder. Let's average that out to 25 hours a week in class.

I have major assignments due in two of those classes most weeks. Major assignments might take anywhere from five to forty hours to complete. Those are extremes at either end, and averaging them out is basically meaningless considering the range.

The time I spend at school is much more telling and useful. For terms one and two, I stayed home for about five days in total. That means I spent 55 days out of 60 at school. On average I probably did around 10 hours of work for each of those days, inside or outside of class. My schedule was a bit different in term 3, and I tried having a day off each week. It didn't go well, and I have spent the last week scrambling to catch back up.

The bottom line? I spend 60-90 hours a week on school projects. That might not seem like a lot to some people—I'm sure there are stock brokers or realtors or career criminals out there who spend 100+ hours a week doing their thing—but to most people, to me, it's a lot. As the end of each term rolls around I start to crave a little downtime for my brain. Well, I have some coming to me, though I have one more massive assignment standing in my way before I can really relax.

There are a couple of contributing factors to my excessive time spent at/with school. I want to do a good job of every assignment I touch, and I also want to maintain my honors average. I'm sitting at 93% atm. The other thing is my specialization. As a project manager I end up not only doing a fair chunk of every group assignment I am on, but I also take on the role of keeping other people rolling, setting deadlines, and organizing the workflow. This adds anywhere from 10-50% to my project workload, but someone has to do it for a project team to turn out good work, and I'm happy to be practicing the skills that I am hoping will get me hired at companies like Irrational Games and BioWare.

Anyway, I'm looking forward to polishing Pistol Reef over the break—I want to get it up on Kongregate or another web portal—and Sacrifice (my board game) is begging for some playtesting so I can get it up for sale online. That's work, too, but it's so far removed from the stressful school stuff that I am really looking forward to it.

Oh, and also? LiveFire Studios is a thing. I will be posting there a lot over the next six months. Check us out.

My First, Real Test in Project Management at VFS

So, let me just acknowledge how poor a showing I've made with the blog lately. Mid October was the last time I even so much as tweeted anything. Shameful. With the new term ramping up (but still relatively, blessedly light on work), I will write here more often over November.

Let's talk about my Flash group.

The second term in Game Design at VFS is well-known as the Flash term. There are plenty of other assignments to do, of course, but creating a Flash game from nothing is "the" assignment that defines these two months. Late last term I sat down with the other class rep and we worked to create six teams from the 26 students in our class, endeavoring to create balanced groups of programmers, artists, level designers, and project managers. We succeeded (or, if we haven't, no one has brought up that they are missing a key skillset just yet).

My team is five people strong, and we are pretty well balanced overall. Over the past week and a half we have organized ourselves into roles, chosen a game concept from a shortlist that each of us brought forward, and played some sample games (Castle Crashers, Tentadrill, and Metal Slug 3) to help develop our aesthetics. As the PM, I have deadlines set for each of our team members so we have a prototype running on Monday. Things seem to be humming along. I have high hopes and a solid plan to bring this all together, but I also have some concerns. I want to expand on one of them here, and I'll do another tomorrow.

First.

Despite how often and how clear it has been communicated to us that being unprofessional is bad for us during our "year-long interview", one of our team members is habitually late for class. I'm not sure how you commit a solid year of your life and a modest year's worth of wages to an organization, and then fail to show up. Each late in GD drops a student's grade by 5% (to a maximum of 10%), not to mention the considerations given to our professionalism grades (each class has some of those, too).

Worse than all of that, by far, is that the people who are teaching us know EVERYONE we will be working with when we graduate. Those bullshit lates and unexcused absences will stick in the minds of our instructors and classmates, and they provide the easiest excuse you could ask for to pass on a resume.

You might be thinking that this is all none of my business, but I disagree. Not only am I working directly with this student—the success of my project hinges on his hard work and consistency—but his attitude reflects on us as a class. The gaming industry is a tightly knit group of people, and my time as a GD23 will likely follow me for much of my career. I want us to be known as a class of professionals that created consistently excellent work, and I know we can be that group, but not if we have people wandering into class late or not at all.

Anyway, enough preaching. The short version is that I hope this student can turn this around and destroy the reputation he has built for himself. I'm going to help him do it, if I can.

One bit of wisdom that I learned during my past career was to "praise in public and punish in private." I won't punish anyone, but I will talk to this student, one on one, and let him know what's happening. He might not really see the effects of being late; he certainly doesn't see the reasons of some instructors who are learning his name for the wrong reasons. There could be something in his personal life that I have no right or need to know about, but this understandable issue could be affecting his ability to be a professional student here.

I'll get the facts, lay out my expectations, and see how we can work around any limitations (if any) that there are. If there are none, I will expect him to be as productive, hard-working, and dedicated as everyone else on my team.

Am I being unreasonable? Got any similar stories from your semi-professional lives to share? Leave a comment, and thanks for visiting.