Producer & Development Manager
Producer
Hermea | Studio Impasse
Hermea is a 3D, third-person speedrunner and is being developed by a 15-member interdisciplinary team in Unreal Engine 4 for a period of 7 months. Play as Hermea, an intern at Hermes' Mail Delivery Service, and quickly deliver mail to the gods and goddesses of Olympus... though they may not want what she's delivering.
Pre-Production Phase
Methodology Explanation & Defense Document
Since my team was unfamiliar with Agile Methodologies​, I produced this document to explain Scrum and Kanban and why we're utilizing them for our team. We used Scrum for preproduction and production, and Kanban for Alpha. Of course, I did create more of a hybrid to better fit our team needs over time due to us all being students with multiple classes but I used these pre-existing frameworks to guide .
Task Planning Document
After the game was solidified, the Task Planning Document was created to add art, programming, and design tasks that would need to be made and implemented. Before production, I was able to determine that there were roughly X tasks that would need to be completed in order for the team to reach our minimum viable product. While I was able to fill out the majority of the document, I also met with the lead team to assign priority levels and task owners before releasing it to the team so they could provide their task hour estimates. Once production started and I received more data, I realized we were able to up the amount we wanted to create. These were moved into Jira accordingly.
Production Phase
Master Data
From the beginning of the project, I collected data in a few categories to check on the health and progress of the project and individuals. My main data point is Project Completion Percentage where I compare the amount of estimated hours per sprint completed compared to the remaining estimated hours left and the amount that should be completed each sprint. I also wanted to ensure time was being used efficiently so I collected how many actual hours went to meetings versus work, and I collected department velocity per sprint to keep an eye on trends and catch issues before they become a problem. I collected more data that can be observed below.
Hours Capacity Document
To determine what would be feasible to create and finish in time for our deadline, I completed an analysis of our hours capacity, splitting up how much time is available for each department and the whole team. We were able to scope our project around these hours, it had me be proactive in getting contractors to aid in level design, and it's a base to compare to our Task Planning Document for developer time estimates per task per sprint.
Vertical Slice Presentation
For the first 3 preproduction sprints, we worked on tasks chosen to hit our vertical slice commitment. Each developer had their own list of commitments to help aid in a sense of direction and confidence in our project. As a result, all commitments were met. Below is our Vertical Slice Presentation. In total, we created 113 environmental assets, 1 player character, 7 VFX, 14 animations, 2 whiteboxes, and 10 features. Our main aim was to create all the base movements and abilities and produce the assets for our first levels in the Acropolis. It was the start of our project that gave us data and knowledge to proceed into the production phase.
Hour Reports per Sprint
More details on my search to ensure time efficiency are the hour reports I created at the end of every sprint. This document is a detailed account on exactly where hours went broken down to each developer and task. More so, I calculate the accuracy per department per sprint to see the usual trend. Analyzing this data helps estimate future task hours more accurately and, arguably more importantly, helps these new developers get better at estimating their time. We mainly focused on learning and helping each other for the culture of our team and collecting this kind of data was one of the steps taken to do that.
The latest status update was given in video format and is provided below. There are more updates and developments to go for Hermea and is going to be released on Steam August 1st.
April Status Update Video
Development Manager
Dead Sea Scrolls by Cave3 Studios
The Dead Sea Scrolls Adventure is an educational experience that was developed by 14 developers in Unity for 3 months. I worked with a subject matter expert to gamify the information they wanted to deliver a historically accurate game intended to enhance the learning objectives of college coursework.
Master Document
At the beginning, I found the sprint logistics and capacity of the team. Then I broke all our features and told expectations down into tasks for art, design, and programming. I was able to use the team capacity to ensure our project was in scope and capable of completion for our given due date, and then I put all the tasks into Jira for the team.
Final Presentation Data
Later on in the project, I created playtesting forms and analyzed the data received afterwards. With the given data, I was able to prove that our educational experience taught those who played it with an average pre-test score of about 40% and average after-test score of about 90%, and this data was shown at our final presentation.
Producer & Art Lead
Out There by Alpha Team
Out There is a first-person, adventure game that was created by 14 developers in Unity for 10 months. A reporter just arrived in Everett Valley, Arizona, to interview residents about alien sightings. When she gets there, however, there's no one to be found. Shelly Fay, determined to get a story, investigates.
Burndown and Gantt Charts
Throughout development, I created and kept track of our project's burndown and individual developer Gantt charts. The burndown chart helped identify trends; the most notable being progress slowing around breaks, having a hard time getting back on track, and then clearly being able to identify when new processes would be put in place to increase productivity again. The Gantt chart, on the other hand, was useful in identifying how many days tasks would take to inform us on future tasks and how each developer worked around each other.
Producer & Designer
Zombie Ants VR by Primary Studios
Zombie Ants VR is an educational prototype that was created by a 9 person team in Unity in 6 weeks. The main goal was to educate players on the zombifying spore, ophiocordyceps, and its ability to infect carpenter ants and manipulate their brain to continue their reproduction cycle.
Playtesting Plan and Results
Accuracy and education were our primary goals on the creation of this prototype experience; therefore, I ran a few rounds of playtesting to ensure the information and way it's presented is correct and effective. Below is the plan I created to ensure testing was done and done properly, and the results after looking through the data and feedback.
Backlog and Hour Tracker
Since the time period we had was short, I created a backlog ranging from high to low priority tasks, arranged them into milestones, and assigned each task a task owner. I also created an hour tracker so we could keep track when we were usually active, ensure we were on track to hit our milestones, and get our required hours in.