Production Process
Starting this project knowing the size of our team and the competencies we had within the team I quickly realized that I’d be required to take on multiple roles as explained in my responsibilities above. With the team size being 9 people I seized this opportunity to put the theoretical knowledge that I had gathered before on production and project management and attempt to apply it to this project. 

As the project kicked off and the initial individual research phase was completed I prepared for the collaborative effort by setting up a Trello board and teaching the tool to the team. Having some knowledge at the time about JIRA I still chose Trello due to the fact that for such a short project the time investment that it would cost onboarding the rest of the team to a heavier tool was too expensive in my opinion.

With Trello being prepared I together with the other team members decided on what everyone would like to focus on and what they excelled at so that we could identify the areas in which we are missing or lacking competencies and come up with countermeasures for those. It was at this very moment that I also introduced the team to the Risk Log and started onboarding them on using it, this helped us substantially with making decisions that would have led to scope creep later in the project.

As we had our concept finalized and wanted to start producing content and actually created the game I employed the Agile project methodology, seeing the short nature of the project this allowed us to make changes to our trajectory on the fly. Doing sprint plannings and also sprint reviews became part of our weekly cycle rapidly, allowing us to iterate and tackle issues that arose proactively. To track velocity on the team’s progress I used Burndown Charts for the team based on the content included in the Sprint Planning, showing this information in a transparent manner to the team members to ensure urgency was understood and key deliverables were met.

Now that content creation was about to start off I facilitated the team by creating asset lists for the audio and art departments which allowed us to have a clear prioritization of the assets required most to get to a M.V.P. this proved itself as one of the key factors to the success of the project as it allowed people to work aligned and assist each other where required.

As the project progressed the usage of the tools became more and more embraced by the team as they were starting to see the value of using them. Combining that factor with me actively reaching out to support any team members that were blocked as well as having 1-on-1’s regularly with the entire team allowed for a very strong group morale which pushed the projects to heights we didn’t think feasible when we started.

Once we got to the stage where we were able to playtest I created a schedule and structure for that to ensure consistent testing and iteration on our findings as well as the documentation of it. This allowed us to make key changes that didn’t cost a lot of time but improved the player experience substantially.  

During this time is also when I set up the Itch.io page and tried to reach out and improve our exposure by sharing our content on Discord communities. This gave us a lot of feedback on our game which we could have even further improved the game on if we had more time. 

Throughout this entire project, however, I had a jack of all trades role, as we were with very few designers and one of them focussing on audio there was a lot of work left on the table still that had to be done. Thus, I took on Level Design as my main task to make sure we could make the USP part of our game which was a sandbox horror game. That being said as with any horror game the setting and theme needs to come across as well so I also took on the role of UI designer to create the menus and the Narrative writing to make sure our story made sense within our world and give value to the collectibles in our game.

Personally doing this was very valuable as it early on in my career improved my collaboration skills with all departments involved, leading to for example the creation of our modular asset kit due to understanding that our scope would not be feasible with bespoke assets.

Having a clear understanding of others their workflows became very important from this moment on as having this base level of knowledge about others their work, understanding their dependencies, risks, and struggles allow me to make better decisions as a producer and be as stronger asset to my team.