During our meetings in the pre-production phase for team Minus one’s project Wild’s Pyre last semester, we collaboratively attempted to create a schedule and a Gantt chart to display tasks that each person would need to complete and the suggested timeframe to complete them in for each of our departments (programmers, artists, level designers, etc.). however, we also had to anticipate any additional assignments/work related to our project that could happen next semester, and since we did not have access to a general timeline of due dates and deadlines for the next semester’s class, we had to blindly assign due dates based on our past experiences of when assignments were usually due by.

Overall, through careful consideration and a bit of luck the schedule and Gantt chart were similar to the semester’s course outline, but we still needed to change the schedule of work we anticipated to get done and when. One of the biggest changes to the timeline was the realization that the last 2 weeks were for a postmortem, and the actual date for project completion was a little before April 9^th, 2024, since we would need both the project and accompanying presentation by then. As a team, we decided to push the dates we set for out schedule back by 2 weeks to compensate for this massive change. There were other scheduled dates that we needed to change, like our milestones as we realized that rushing to complete those while playtesting the builds at the exact same time would lead to periods where crunch was inevitable, and as a result we moved our milestone dates by a week ahead as well.

Ultimately, I’ve learned that all schedules planned in advance of the project will almost certainly shift due to situations or constraints that weren’t known at the time, so when planning a schedule it may be better to loosely plan it and get a rough idea of the project’s outline and come back to it when more info is obtained.