Wesnoth

Red team

In the class of open source management was a home assignment to develop the game named Wesnoth. For some obscure reason I ended up as team leader. Teams were composed by Kaido Kikkas. As I have a background in the field of education, then open source and Wesnoth have not been present in my everyday life. So I was a team leader in the field I know nothing about.

Already at the begging our teams suffered losses: our team member from Ethiopia could not be part of our team having some problems with the internet. Hence we were left with three only!

We agreed in the beginning since everybody wants to have fun with map drawing that every member of the team will compose one level of the game. Although this kind of agreement did not match the best way with our profiles, we still decided to try.

First we (team) had to come up with a scenario. I wrote basis of the scenario and sent it to our team for reviewing and commenting. Scenario was received ok from other team members and we agreed on some deadlines when something must be ready.

As all team members were working and having extremely busy times at their daily work, we did not manage to keep any of those deadlines. As a team leader I had some doubts whether to choose some other style and start strongly controlling but I didn’t consider this right. Because in the end - what matters is whether we do development of the game not whether we succeed to hold on strictly our deadlines. Maybe it was wrong decision because it was understandable that one of our team members - Egert - has some problems and probably would not cope with the assignment. In the middle of december it appeared that he was still with us but a couple of days before the final deadline I have to say that unfortunately another team member has left us and at the end - red team today has only two members (and none of us has background in computer science). So as it became clear that our Wesnoth will have only two levels and we had to change our storyline a little.

About the game:
Development of this game was a huge challenge for me for several reasons. First: I don't like computer games that much. I almost don’t play them. Second: not having any previous programming skills it was at the beginning quite difficult to figure out how this stuff works. I had some help from my husband who worked with me and explained the logic behind it. I must admit that the most fun part for me was still drawing the map. The scenario-language become understandable after a while. As well did this how all those pictures, scenarios, map go together.
Although it was a really hard assignment for me I'm still quite happy about it. I don’t see myself as an open source developer in the future but it is good to know how these things work.

My thanks go to my husband for patience and to Geroli.