It's kind of hard to write a post-mortem when nothing really goes wrong on the project. When we all filled out post-its and put them on the board, we all struggled to come up with anything negative. The biggest hurdle we faced while developing this prototype was making the Kinect behave nicely. I got the base functionality working rather quickly, but like I'm sure I said in an earlier post, it's very easy to get the Kinect working, but very difficult to get it to work well. When we had a bit of time to spare, we spent several hours experimenting with and tweaking the Kinect controls. In the end however, we decided we were only making it worse and figured we'd put some serious manpower behind it if it got picked up by the client. It functioned well enough for a prototype, and we had mouse functionality built in as well.
The only other issue was some of the final art was delivered so late that it didn't make it into the final presentation. It did however make it into the final prototype, so it was hardly a big deal.
I guess we should focus on the good then. Imaginary Jason and I decided to use pair programming for almost the entirety of the prototype and I think it worked very well. The basic structure of the design came together very quickly, because he was well-versed in XNA from a previous project and I had dabbled in it a bit before. Our memories were both incomplete, but together we knew enough to bust out every feature quickly. We also benefited greatly by being there to keep each other on task during class time. Typically anytime someone would come up to me and start talking I'd lose all sense of workflow and progress would halt for awhile. With both of us there, we tended to just ignore distractions. I don't think pair programming is the best solution for most situations, but it definitely has its uses.
I'm sure Bob would agree, I remember your talk!
Anyway, like I said, all in all it was a very successful project and I enjoyed working with Jason, Alice and Mike. We were way more focused than the last group while still remaining very laid back and casual. Good stuff.
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