Today marked the end of my junior year at university, and the end of my biggest game production project yet, Gnome Depot. It was such a cool experience to be the producer on a production team which went through a Greenlight process, an onboarding process, and even a coronavirus-pandemic-remote-learning-transition process! Despite these three big humps in our development timeline, my team maintained its level of productivity and persevered.
Speaking honestly, I'm extremely proud of them; as a producer, what I need to complete my work is a word processing program and an internet connection. But for everyone else on my team, due to the pandemic, they became distanced from critical modeling, design and coding programs that were usually available at school. Not to mention the high-powered computers in the labs, which were replaced with whatever hamsterwheel-powered contraption they had access to at home. So now that we've reached this point, I'd like to briefly summarize my role, and then illuminate on two ways this project has made me better at what I do.
What I did:
As the co-producer of Gnome Depot, I managed the team during meetings, led presentations at progress reviews, served as liaison to our professor who played the role of our stakeholder, managed the product backlog and taskboard. Once Greenlight passed and we acquired more members, my co-producer David handled documentation and financial estimates, and also relayed information between the team and stakeholders. We worked together on scheduling and marketing plans. Once the pandemic hit, and we were left with little to do, I learned how to use Autodesk Maya and modeled some 3D assets for the background of the game, and David learned C++ to assist the programmers.
How I improved:
1. I became better at balancing work and play.
I never knew how much I loved leading a team. I mean, I always knew I liked it, but never how deeply. Through this project, I was able to interact with a bunch of fun people that made the highlight of my week whenever I got to hang out with them. We would screw around so much during meetings that it eventually got to the point where our productivity was taking a hit because of it. This was made worse by social distancing, which drastically reduced everyone's motivation to keep working.
I had to really push myself to keep up with my team and keep the project going, while still keeping our team atmosphere "semi-serious," as we came to call it. Through this I developed a better intuition of how to manage my time. I became better at empathizing with my team and leveling with them. This impacted all of them too, as they felt a stronger cohesion between us.
2. I gained a better understanding of what my teammates do.
This project, I changed the way I usually go about assigning tasks. Instead of guiding each person through making each individual task, I let them write them on their own time. This saved time in meetings and also made team members feel less like I was deciding their work for them. All I had to do was make sure time was that everyone had work to do, and that they were estimating and recording time. If they estimated too much for one task, I'd have them split it up.
I also dipped my toes into the world of 3D modeling for the first time. I found it surprisingly fun, although frustrating at the same time. By continuing my language studies on my own time, I really saw myself developing hard skills and understanding the work my team members performed on a deeper level.
Our team will continue development into the summer. We'll use the same processes as before, but we won't have a professor grading it as a project nor a deadline to meet. I'm excited that this will mean we'll get to put our own spin on the game! It's a great feeling to be continuing on with this great team and I can't wait to see what the future holds for our red-capped friend Gnolan.
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