Genre: Co-op multiplayer
Primary Role: Associate Producer
Platform: Mobile
Engine: ?
Project Duration: ?
Team Size: ?
Status: ?
Lead Discipline Overview
As mentioned earlier, leads, mostly among art and audio, had been divided across different projects for the first time in years and it became clear rather soon that nobody really understood what the expectations were in terms of responsibilities and what meetings to attend.
So, I sat down together with my supervisor, the department manager and the applicable leads to settle down on a clear overview, so that we could move ahead more smoothly from that moment onward.
Sprint Reviews
Vertigo Studios Amsterdam did not have much history in terms of sprint reviews when I arrived. For the previous project, Metro: Awakening, there was no desperate need for it due to the presence of other reviews and the main driver behind the planning being the ever-changing quality targets.
Though for a smaller project such as this, a sprint review could prove beneficial. Especially with a management/lead group divided across different projects, it would be good to have a regular more generic review of the game and save a portion of their time. Therefore, I was tasked to set up an agenda, template, and arrange for the devices so internal stakeholders could try out the game for themselves.
About the game:
The Process:
Team Management
For this project, team management was a bit more different than I used to; due to the nature of it being a mobile game, starting small and gradually adding in more content guided through analytics, development was highly flexible. Our sprints were made shorter for a more rapid response to change and me and the leading producer on that project really had to find the balance between the stakeholders' desires for those adjustments and team motivation, as well as finalizing features.
UXR/Playtest Planning & Pipeline
With now two producers on a medium-sized team, I had a bit of extra time on my hands, which gave me more opportunity to pick up different tasks and try out new things, such as deliberating the planning and process for User Experience Research, which also contained what type of research/testing would be done when.
This also opened up questions of whether we would be doing playtesting internally and how incoming feedback from such research and/or playtests would be dealt with. Hence, I had set up the process for Feedback Management alongside.
Responsibilities
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Team Management
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General Notetaking
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UXR Planning & Pipeline
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Team Playtest Organization
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Feedback Management Workflow
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Milestone Requirements
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Set Up Sprint Reviews
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Art Lead Discipline Overview
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Set Up Access Tracking Sheet
Collaborate on Milestone Requirements
As the timeline was rather tight, it was of important to really understand the chunks of work we were aiming for. The initial milestone agreements were rather loose, so to clarify our focus to us and the team, I set more specific requirements and checked those with the stakeholders.
This cleared up some deviations in terms of priority and helped us achieve a more feasible scope for the agreed upon dates.
This poster was made by Salomé Busurashvili