Logline:
Role & Responsibilities: Production/Management:- Utilized burndown charts to manage tasks and work hours while ensuring that milestones were met.
- Created a game macro to anticipate scope and manage scope cuts.
- Coordinated meetings between developers to ensure everyone was on the same page.
- Organized feedback to address from playtesting data and peers.
Narrative:- Collaborated on drafting a cohesive narrative arc.
- Iterated on narrative arc according to feedback.
- Made choices to cut down on narrative when applicable to reduce scope.
Design:- Worked to meld game mechanic and narrative with cohesion.
- Designed small levels utilizing game mechanics with a story driven context.
Engineering:- Scripted basic object behavior to meet unique experience goals.
Lessons Learned: Hard Skills: Unity, C#, Perforce, Burndown Charts, Game Macro
Soft Skills: Small team task distribution, scope, and communication.
- As a team we vastly underestimated the scope of the project we designed in our heads. To work through this, we communicated consistently about our bandwidth and applied realistic expectations to each sprint in order to adjust our scope accordingly.
- With the team being as small as this, we were careful to order our tasks by importance and balance our work hours evenly.
- At every step of the way, the team was aware of decisions both creative and production related.
Concentric design and navigating narrative changes through scope cuts.
- The Admiral initially was a much larger project in terms of its narrative prior to release.
- Through the creation of a game macro and many conversations we thankfully agreed that the game was too big and spent meetings retooling our narrative design.
- Through a process of Concentric Design, we at least knew that regardless of outcome of our narrative scope cuts, we would still have the core gameplay.
Team
Engineer, Co-Developer
Producer, Co-Developer
Composer, Audio Engineer