Complete a project retrospective

When you finish the practical work on your game, there’s still some more to do before you prepare for your next steps, whether that’s publishing your game or choosing a new project to work on.

A project retrospectives is a structured approach to help you evaluate a project that you have completed. You don’t only reflect on the outcomes of your project when you complete a retrospective — you also evaluate the processes and decisions that led to those outcomes.

In this tutorial, you’ll explore the findings of the Out of Circulation retrospective, complete a retrospective for your own game, and identify any actions that you need to take in your next game project.

In a project retrospective, you take the opportunity to reflect on what happened during your project and identify how your actions impacted the final outcome. You can complete a solo retrospective if you worked on your project alone, but it is also an opportunity to gather insights and feedback from other collaborators if you worked with a wider group of people.

Retrospective approach

Although it’s often natural to focus on things that didn’t go so well, a retrospective is intended to give you a more holistic view — there’s plenty to learn from things that went well during a project too. A retrospective is a time for honest sharing and reflection to help everyone involved grow and improve; it’s not a tool for assigning blame for any perceived missteps or problems.

When you complete a retrospective, it’s usual to have a facilitator to guide the team through the process. This is a useful way to keep the discussion focused and on topic.

Tip: You can ask someone else to facilitate the process even if you are completing a solo retrospective!

Retrospective structure

Most retrospectives take the following basic structure:

1. Reflect and share: In response to prepared questions, contributors reflect on the experience and share their thoughts.
2. Prioritize: The team selects the most important topics or themes to focus on.
3. Discuss: The team discusses the themes or topics and identifies concrete actions that they can take in the next project based on what they have learned.

The prepared questions for reflection could be as simple as “What went well?” and “What could have been better?” Alternatively, the questions could be based on specific phases or workflows in the project.

Retrospective tools

You don’t need any special tools for a project retrospective. If you’re completing a retrospective in person, a whiteboard and sticky notes are useful for sharing and organizing reflections. If you’re completing a retrospective online with a remote team, you can use a digital whiteboard in the same way or select a specific retrospective tool that meets your needs. We used Parabol for the Out of Circulation retrospective.

Although Out of Circulation is a small vertical slice case study, it was a relatively large project for the core team that worked on it. It was also the first time that we had prioritized accessibility throughout a project, and we learned a lot along the way.

Reflection prompts

We used the following structured set of reflection questions to help organize our thoughts:

• Continue: What behaviors and actions are working well?
• Less: What are we doing too much or spending too much time on?
• More: What should we do more or spend more time on?
• Stop: What isn’t helping or adding value?

Start: What should we explore or start doing?

Reflection grouping

When we had all added reflections based on these prompts, we spent five minutes collaboratively grouping them into topics. Sometimes every reflection on the same topic was in response to one prompt, but sometimes this meant grouping suggestions of things to stop, start, and continue that were all linked to the same topic.

By grouping our responses, we made our discussion more holistic rather than (potentially) focusing on single small issues.

Topic prioritization

Each member of the team could cast five votes for the topics that we each felt were most important to discuss. This approach empowered us to spend the discussion time focusing on the things that were most important to the team overall, rather than the priorities of any one person.

There were five topics that we spent a significant amount of time discussing in the Out of Circulation retrospective.

Planning

The planning work that we completed was critical to the successful completion of Out of Circulation. However, with the benefit of hindsight and a clearer understanding of the full range of project dependencies (both related to accessibility and outside of that) we would have spent even more time on the planning stage before beginning work in Unity.

We had an initial short conversation about our definition of success for a more detailed planning stage. The team then decided to follow up with a more detailed evaluation so that we could identify the right next steps.

Project milestones and reviews

A milestone project planning approach worked very well for Out of Circulation and meant that we could share builds of the vertical slice with our external specialist reviewers on a regular cycle. We planned to adopt this approach more widely when it’s a good fit for a project.

Player feedback

The feedback from external accessibility specialists was critical to the successful completion of Out of Circulation. Additional playtesting by people outside of the core project team was also incredibly useful and helped us identify a number of points of potential exclusion that we may have otherwise been unaware of. More opportunities for player feedback throughout design and development would have been even better!

We had an initial discussion about how to support deeper integration of player feedback cycles in all projects and identified follow-up actions for the team to explore.

Timeframes

We scoped a very ambitious project given the time and resources available. This meant that at times there were very tight deadlines for every contributor to the project, sometimes with complex dependencies. Sometimes decisions had to be made very quickly; under ideal circumstances, there would be more time to explore the possibilities before confirming a course of action.

The team discussed how we could have mitigated particular challenges that were identified earlier in the production process to help improve planning for the next project.

Potential for future iterations

The team was excited by the possibilities that Out of Circulation offered, both as an accessibility case study that could be improved upon and as a game in its own right. We discussed the features that we had implemented and ways that they could be improved in the future. We also began to discuss the resources that would be required to do this.

To complete your own retrospective:

1. Find a facilitator and plan a time when you and any project collaborators are available to hold a retrospective session. One to two hours is a good amount of time to reserve for the retrospective.

2. Share your reflection prompt questions in advance so everyone participating in your retrospective has a chance to think over their experiences before the workshop.

3. Gather any materials or set up your online tool in advance so it’s ready to go when you start your retrospective.

4. Work through the stages of the retrospective process. If you are completing a retrospective alone, the discussion stage is where you can work through your thoughts with a facilitator or think through them independently.

5. Identify the next steps that you need to take for your next project. You might be able to identify actions immediately, or you may need to plan some additional discussion or exploration outside of the retrospective — both of these options are common.

However you approach it, your project retrospective should help you to identify concrete steps that you can take to improve the experience when you work on your next project or plan a new stage of work on your current game.

You’ve almost finished the Practical Game Accessibility course. In the next and final tutorial, you’ll explore some final considerations for sharing your game more widely and consider the role of ongoing feedback and improvement in your ongoing journey as a creator who prioritizes accessibility.