Hello, I’m Mod Kelpie, Project Manager and Product Owner of the Ninja Team. I have been at Jagex for just over 4 years, joining the company initially as a QA Tester. The following is a blog about some of the things I got up to in the week beginning Monday 22nd June, with a bit more emphasis on the Ninja side of things.
Mondays tend to be the busiest day of the week. My schedule is full of reoccurring planning meetings and we have our weekly game release. Since joining Ninja though, the first hour of most mornings is dedicated to reading through player feedback and suggestions. There’s more emphasis on doing this within the Ninja team on a Monday compared to other days, as we have our weekly planning meeting in the afternoon. When anybody in the team comes across a suggestion they like, they add it to our spreadsheet and mark it as unapproved. During the meeting we go through the spreadsheet and discuss any new additions, before choosing to either approve or reject them.
Our normal start to the week is focusing on ninja fixes and to do as many as needed until we are in a healthy state. How many that go into a release really depends on several factors, such as the size of the main update and the amount of other bug fixes there are. Once we are happy with the amount of ninja fixes done, we move onto project work. This particular week our ninja fixes board is already in a very healthy state, so most of the week will be spent on projects. This is good as we have several things nearly done, so the theme of the week is finishing things off.
I have also decided that I would like us to work on the next ninja spotlight next week, meaning we have this week for planning. After some discussions with the Ninja and Guardian teams, we settle on a spotlight about Vampyres and the Myreque Quests. After taking some initial ideas from the Guardians, I create a thread in the Ninja forums to begin taking player suggestions.
Today’s game release is the Ninja spotlight on Artisan’s Workshop and so as it goes live just before lunch time, I decide to grab some food and hang out in-game for a while to see how things are. All things seem well, the biggest criticism is that it doesn’t feel like a big update. Considering it is not meant to be, I am pleased and leave players to it.
Tuesday is nowhere near as eventful. After doing the usual round of reading player feedback I spend most of my morning with some task for my manager. The main thing in the afternoon is the weekly Dev Q&A stream, which I tend to feature on. The stream is probably my favourite part of my week. Even though I still get a bit nervous and feel awkward on camera, it is completely different to anything I have done before.
I also spend some time today following up on the spotlight thread I created yesterday. I go through and create a list of everything the players suggest that is feasible with the resources we have. As the list is quite large, I decide to book a planning meeting for the next day. This will give Mod Timbo a chance to go through some of the balancing changes required before the dev is ready to begin next week.
Every other Wednesday we have sprint reviews. Each team has 45 minutes to present what they have achieved over the past two weeks to a room of stakeholders. There are four teams, so for people like me who attend every review, it goes on for three hours. We recently started doing reviews for the Ninja team, since our work is turning into a fair bit of project work. Today is in fact the second ever Ninja review. In a discussion with the team in the morning, we establish what we are going to show off and I’ll talk through the status of each project afterwards. This goes well and we receive little to no feedback, bar praise
Next, we share our planning meeting for the Vampyre spotlight with a few members of the Guardians. After going through the list, most of the approved changes are for post quest content and it doesn’t feel as significant as previous spotlights. Therefore we agree to go ahead with the changes, but will try to ensure it is pushed as more of a ‘in other news’ project.
Another hot topic is the ability to reset the quests. As the work has previously been done for skill resets, we figure that it’s possible to do – however, the way it functions wouldn’t be desirable in the main game. We agree as a team that the best way to do it is to add the functionality to the beta world as a nice little feature for those who do want to replay these quests. All seem happy and with the help of Mod Easty it turns out we can get it in by the end of this week!
Every other Thursday is a TAPP day, which stands for Thursday Allday Personal Projects . I’ll keep my projects to myself for now though
It is the last Friday of the month, which means it is Beer Friday! First we have to do some work though
. My morning is occupied by two meetings. First, a meeting with the Analytics team who show off a bunch of cool information that helps Product Owners determine the focus of their projects. The second meeting is one for all the scrum masters to get together with a few others to discuss how things are going within their teams. As it has been a review week, there tends to be a bit more to discuss. Generally though the meetings go quicker each week, meaning we are learning and improving.
The week is finally over (I loved it really) and I get to chillax with the rest of the company for beers (or cider in my case) and snacks. Of course, I can’t fit a week of my life into one post, so most of my other time is spent with emails, conversations and reviewing work-in-progress content.
And that concludes a week in my life. I hope this was interesting to the one of you who has read this far. Feel free to ask me questions on twitter @JagexKelpie or reddit /u/JagexKelpie
Cheers
Monday
Mondays tend to be the busiest day of the week. My schedule is full of reoccurring planning meetings and we have our weekly game release. Since joining Ninja though, the first hour of most mornings is dedicated to reading through player feedback and suggestions. There’s more emphasis on doing this within the Ninja team on a Monday compared to other days, as we have our weekly planning meeting in the afternoon. When anybody in the team comes across a suggestion they like, they add it to our spreadsheet and mark it as unapproved. During the meeting we go through the spreadsheet and discuss any new additions, before choosing to either approve or reject them.
Our normal start to the week is focusing on ninja fixes and to do as many as needed until we are in a healthy state. How many that go into a release really depends on several factors, such as the size of the main update and the amount of other bug fixes there are. Once we are happy with the amount of ninja fixes done, we move onto project work. This particular week our ninja fixes board is already in a very healthy state, so most of the week will be spent on projects. This is good as we have several things nearly done, so the theme of the week is finishing things off.
I have also decided that I would like us to work on the next ninja spotlight next week, meaning we have this week for planning. After some discussions with the Ninja and Guardian teams, we settle on a spotlight about Vampyres and the Myreque Quests. After taking some initial ideas from the Guardians, I create a thread in the Ninja forums to begin taking player suggestions.
Today’s game release is the Ninja spotlight on Artisan’s Workshop and so as it goes live just before lunch time, I decide to grab some food and hang out in-game for a while to see how things are. All things seem well, the biggest criticism is that it doesn’t feel like a big update. Considering it is not meant to be, I am pleased and leave players to it.
Tuesday
Tuesday is nowhere near as eventful. After doing the usual round of reading player feedback I spend most of my morning with some task for my manager. The main thing in the afternoon is the weekly Dev Q&A stream, which I tend to feature on. The stream is probably my favourite part of my week. Even though I still get a bit nervous and feel awkward on camera, it is completely different to anything I have done before.
I also spend some time today following up on the spotlight thread I created yesterday. I go through and create a list of everything the players suggest that is feasible with the resources we have. As the list is quite large, I decide to book a planning meeting for the next day. This will give Mod Timbo a chance to go through some of the balancing changes required before the dev is ready to begin next week.
Wednesday
Every other Wednesday we have sprint reviews. Each team has 45 minutes to present what they have achieved over the past two weeks to a room of stakeholders. There are four teams, so for people like me who attend every review, it goes on for three hours. We recently started doing reviews for the Ninja team, since our work is turning into a fair bit of project work. Today is in fact the second ever Ninja review. In a discussion with the team in the morning, we establish what we are going to show off and I’ll talk through the status of each project afterwards. This goes well and we receive little to no feedback, bar praise
Next, we share our planning meeting for the Vampyre spotlight with a few members of the Guardians. After going through the list, most of the approved changes are for post quest content and it doesn’t feel as significant as previous spotlights. Therefore we agree to go ahead with the changes, but will try to ensure it is pushed as more of a ‘in other news’ project.
Another hot topic is the ability to reset the quests. As the work has previously been done for skill resets, we figure that it’s possible to do – however, the way it functions wouldn’t be desirable in the main game. We agree as a team that the best way to do it is to add the functionality to the beta world as a nice little feature for those who do want to replay these quests. All seem happy and with the help of Mod Easty it turns out we can get it in by the end of this week!
Thursday
Every other Thursday is a TAPP day, which stands for Thursday Allday Personal Projects . I’ll keep my projects to myself for now though
Friday
It is the last Friday of the month, which means it is Beer Friday! First we have to do some work though
. My morning is occupied by two meetings. First, a meeting with the Analytics team who show off a bunch of cool information that helps Product Owners determine the focus of their projects. The second meeting is one for all the scrum masters to get together with a few others to discuss how things are going within their teams. As it has been a review week, there tends to be a bit more to discuss. Generally though the meetings go quicker each week, meaning we are learning and improving.
The week is finally over (I loved it really) and I get to chillax with the rest of the company for beers (or cider in my case) and snacks. Of course, I can’t fit a week of my life into one post, so most of my other time is spent with emails, conversations and reviewing work-in-progress content.
And that concludes a week in my life. I hope this was interesting to the one of you who has read this far. Feel free to ask me questions on twitter @JagexKelpie or reddit /u/JagexKelpie
Cheers
-Kelps
17-Jul-2015 14:46:06
