X0 Milestone Reached!

Yeah, I know, 3 posts in a day! I just started writing this blog today and I wanted to post how our project is progressing so far. And well, our project has just reached X0 Milestone! Hurray!! But wait, what does this mean? Before I started the project, I have laid out a couple of milestones that the project needs to hit before it is deemed to be App Store worthy:

X0 - Plan Complete

X1 - Game is Playable with 1 Level

X2 - Code and Feature Complete

X3 - Store Ready

I have assigned a set of tasks for each of these milestones and in order to track the progress of our project, I made my own burn down chart - here's how it looks like as of today:

Basically, this chart tells me how we are doing in the project in relation to a projection of how we are supposed to be doing in order to meet our milestones and deadlines. This means that if the red line is ahead of the blue line, then our project is delayed. If it is behind the blue line, then we are ahead of schedule. And if it is exactly within the blue line, then we are just on time.

Judging from our burn down chart, we are on schedule so Hurray!! We are on the right track! As you've noticed, the project is supposed to complete somewhere around March 2011 - but wait, that's too long! iOS5 might have come out by then and the game might not run anymore with this new update! To deal with this, I have a sub-milestone called PD1 which is supposed to happen after X1 (around Week 35) and what that means is that I will need to revisit the schedule and adjust it accordingly in order to be more competitive as well as reasonable. Right now, our game features 10 levels and I've conservatively estimated that in order to finish one level, it will take us at least 2 weeks. Now depending on how fast I finish one level after X1, this should give me an idea on how much time I need in order to finish the rest of the levels!! Pretty neat! But until X1 is done, it's March 2011 for us! (oh dear God, please help us!)

Jim