Critical Appraisal – The Chaotic Journey of Will Hobbs

VR Design Research Labs Critical Appraisal

After planning the idea out roughly, I spent too long messing around and testing mechanics that I wasn’t even sure I would be using in the project. This certainly came back to punish me. I also spent too long trying to figure out the combat system as I would look at the scripts and the animators and would run away to do something else rather than slog through it trying to understand and make it work.

In the future I need to plan more thoroughly. At the very minimum, I need to list everything that I will need broadly at the start, such as sound. That way I can have a crude to-do list throughout the entire project that can be modified with more details later. Also, at least write tidbits in the blogs as I go instead of just keeping versions of everything I’ve done to then comb through later trying to expain once I’ve forgotten most of the details. And most importantly, do more work earlier in the project. Even if it’s 20 minutes a day thats still better than nothing.

Sheffield Critical Appraisal

I think we started off strong and enthusiastic but our lack of experience quicky became clear in my opinion. Roles were decided pretty quickly and fairly for the idea that we originally wanted to do. However, some people ended up getting more workload than they should have due to having to change the project plan. We should’ve had backup plans in place when we started but our lack of experience didn’t give us thatt foresight. The earlier tasks ended up taking too long to complete, which affected the rest of the project schedule, bunching up a lot of work towards the end to the point that we needed an extension. Also, we didn’t realise how the workload of this project would affect, and be affected by, the workload of our other project with their deadlines being so close together. Our team management also collapsed within a few weeks with some people burning out and being overloaded whilst others would forget tasks they were given, or would let others pick up their slack. Having some people picking up slack also contributed to the morale plummet.

For a first time learning experience obviously things would go wrong that we would learn from, but I feel like we didn’t even do alright for our first time. I am being a bit harsh but I am including myself in these generic comments along with everyone else. In the future I might put myself forward to manage a project like this. I usually don’t like to take on leadership responsibility as I feel a lot of other people would like to have the position, and I am perfectly happy with being told what needs to be done and doing it, but it became clear to me that working in a team with the lack of management that we had is worse for me than taking charge myself.