Blog post 4: Lack of motivation

Hello there.

This week I am going to talk about the biggest issue that my team, team Troll, has got in our development of the game “Depth”. That problem is lack of motivation. This problem have slowly been creeping up on the members of my team, the further we have gotten with the game and the closer we get to the next course. This was brought up by one of the graphics in my team and the other members agreed that it was a problem that they also faced. The reasons to why this problem existed was that we have never worked on a project for this long before, the concept of the game was not ours, and, therefore, does not bring the same amount of joy as if we would work with the concept of Noblesse Oblige, that we designed in the previous course. Though we have done changes to the original concept of “Depth”, it still does not feel like we are one hunder percent doing our own game.

As the project manager (scrum master) it is my job to find a solution to these kind of problems. I spent a while trying to find ways to increase motivation, though I found nothing that could help us.

When we had our sprint retrospetive last week, this was brought up again. But this time we also had the help of our second year scrum master, Kim. He suggested that we should do something outside of our game and school together. Some examples he brought up was to go out and eat at a restaurant or play some games. Anything to take our minds of our work. This was when I recalled an idea that Clara Cox, the lead artist of my team, had. Playing Dungeons and Dragons as a group. When this idea was brought up, everyones energy was instantly increased and a discussion broke out about how we should do it.

This idea was then expanded upon after the sprint planning meeting that we had the following monday.

Just by planning this game of Dungeons and Dragons, I could see an instant increase of motivation from everyone in the team.