Kitty City Mysteries

Adventure Academy (AA) is an MMO for Middle Schoolers. They go on quests, and some of these quests are learning games. I was asked to create a team called GSDK to build these games. This example game is called Kitty Kitty Mysteries, and played on the film noire of the classic detective genre. In reality, it teaches kids about making inferences from reading different sources and clues.

I created about 5 small cross-functional teams. We used a hybrid unique Kanban method that tracked only major stages, as they were smallish games and stages could be met within 1 or 2 sprints. I gave the teams a lot of autonomy with stand-ups and check-ins, but mostly tracked the stages concept/prototype/alpha/beta/final. The teams really liked the freedom, enjoyed that they could make any call with their team to get to the next stage quickly.

It was a good model, all teams enjoyed it. and they generated game content very fast.