Riley Dix

This was my first time co-producing a project since I began my production journey during my undergrad. I was able to put everything I have learned since that project into practice here. We scoped this project really well. We made full use of our time to implement some really cool mechanics and high quality art, while still giving the team time to spend with their family over Thanksgiving. We even had time to polish the project due to finishing ahead of schedule (which is worth mentioning, since the class was about creating prototypes on short schedules, not full polished games).

The only thing I would change from this project would be to do more of our testing on built versions of the game. We did most of our playtesting in-engine to save time for our programmers. This resulted in a net time loss however, due to us uncovering a load of build issues and technical debt we had to rush and solve towards the end of the project cycle.

From my bird's eye view of the project as the producer, I was able to learn a lot about the added challenges in each discipline that arise from working on a mobile game. This project also gave me an opportunity to learn the ins and outs of mobile game publishing, and what goes into putting a game onto the app store of different devices.

Next time for a project like this, I would look to see if I could procure a few cheap and old iOS/android devices for my teammates to use as testing platforms, so we wouldn't be so dependent on finding external playtesters who specifically had the device we needed to test.

This was a very short project cycle at less than 3 weeks long, so while I handled production tasks for the team, I had to wear other hats to pull my weight for the team. I took this opportunity to try leaning even harder into agile methodologies for setting the team's schedule than usual.

I set four dates over the course of the nineteen days we had to have something playable by each of those dates. I then lined up a set of external playtesters for each of these days, and we were able to polish and refine our design direction several times during the project. I believe this aggressive testing and iteration schedule is what led to our game receiving a judge's choice award despite the high level of competition on this game jam.

This project went smoothly for the majority of its runtime, largely because I had found people I wanted to work with on this project over the course of my time at school. We went into the year with a full team that covered all the disciplines we needed for the game, and also with experience working with one another to ensure we were compatible teammates. In the last third of the project however, we were presented with the opportunity to add new team members to our project, and we decided to do so to ensure we could hit our art goals and cut fewer corners.

We ran into a challenge at this point. We had pre-picked our teammates before the project, and hadn't planned to add more people. As a result, we didn't have an onboarding structure and had taken for granted each team member's intrinsic motivation to work on the project.

The first of these challenges was simple to take on. I had the new team members start working in a part of the asset pipeline at first which required less knowledge of the rest of the workflow to do their job. From there, I scheduled work meetings with them and the other artists so that they could learn how the rest of the pipeline functioned as they worked. Finally, I was able to give them larger responsibilities in the project once they had been fully onboarded.

The latter challenge regarding the new team members lacking motivation was hard to address at its root, but I worked around it as best I could. I did this by establishing a simple communication system with the whole team where people could explain during the pre-sprint meeting if something was coming up that might keep them from outputting their usual amount of work in the near future. That would let me plan around the team's expected output more accurately for each sprint. In addition this system let others in each department feel like they had a better grasp on where their team was at, mentally and workload-wise. Finally and most importantly it also helped to keep people accountable when they needed time off the project.