Project management tools - Unity Tutorial

- [Instructor] In this movie, I have jumped back into HacknPlan to take a look at the topsy turvy cake design project that we created earlier in this course. In that example, we looked at how HacknPlan could be used to create a games design document. In this video, I want to take an existing design, and look at how we can begin to add tasks, tasks simply discreet items of work, that are assigned to different members of the team. If somebody assigned you a job to do, then that for you is a particular task. Let's take a look at how we can create tasks based on a games design using HacknPlan. I'm going to move here to the design model section, where we can see some of the design elements that we added to a game design example here. You'll see that we have three fundamental chapters marking out the time within the game, but we also have a mechanic here, called buy cake layer. The idea here is that you can spend point within the game, two purchase add-ons and upgrades for the cake tower that players are building. Obviously for your games and your projects, the mechanics themselves will be different, but there'll nonetheless be mechanics all the same. And every time you identify a mechanic to constructing your game, there's going to be work and tasks associated with it. Let's see an example of how we can add tasks to this particular mechanic. I'm going to select the buy cake item here. And you'll see from the top, there is a button called Add. I'll click on the Add button, and here we have a range of different things that we can add to this particular item. I can add a child element if I want to expand on the game design itself, but in this case, I'm going to add a task. So I'm going to select Task. Now, here in this case, I want to identify and provide more information about the task. One, if there's a mechanic called buy cake layer, and we have to spend points to buy that cake layer then we're going to need a point system. We're going to need a system in which the player can earn points so then later, they can spend them. So we'll need someone, probably somebody in the programming team, to develop a point system. So under the title here for this particular task, I'm going to name this point system. Point system like so. I'm going to select the design element that it's associated with him and by default this is automatically configured for us. You'll see here that we have a board field. I'm going to leave that right now and the default and we'll see how that works in the next video. The next thing I want to take a look at is the category. You'll see here that in the dropdown, I have a variety of different categories that this task could be associated with. Since the point system is going to be assigned to the programmer of our team, I'm going to make sure the category here is assigned to programming, and then choose, Create. You'll see immediately here under work items, that our point system has been added. It's currently scheduled as planned. Let's add another task. I'm going to move to the top and choose Add, and then choose Task. This time, if we're going to be buying cake layers, there's going to be different types of layers that we can potentially buy. And if we're going to be representing this system to the player character, the earning and the spending of points, then it also seemed like there's visual components associated with this. What does a point look like on screen? How does it appear to the gamer? So this seems like it's going to be a task for the artist inside the team. So if a category here, I'm going to change the dropdown from programming to art. And inside the title field, I'm going to say point icon, because we need to earn points and spend them, and there needs to be a representation on the screen, of what a point looks like. So I'm going to make sure, here I call this point icon, is associated to the art category and then choose Create. We've now created two work items associated with the cake layer mechanic. Now, as you elaborate on your games design documents, and you begin to think of different tasks associated to different elements, it could be that your project has hundreds and maybe even thousands of different tasks all assigned to different members of your team. There's no right or wrong answer to how many tasks that you should have. The key point is, is you need to have as many tasks as necessary, and they need to be assigned to the right person and allocated a reasonable amount of time. Here, we've seen an example, of how to create tasks for particular design elements. In the next movie, we'll pick up where we've left off here and look at how we can manage those tasks by using a Kanban board.