Role: Producer
Name: Jordi Nunes
My Job:
My job has consisted on manage all the team, stablish pipelines of production, coordinate diferents departments and scrums, take strategical decisions & keep track the development.
Production
The project starts officially 10th of Febraury. Subject’s teacher, simulated to be studio’s CEO and explained us the new game we were going to develop. An asymmetric co-op kart racing game, with the following game pillars:
- Stylized kart racing game with relatable characters.
- Asymmetric cooperative experience.
- Short and replayable sessions.
Also gave us subject’s calendar. I modified a little bit adding Alpha 2 delivery to split 4 weeks sprint in 2.
Pre-Production
In Concept Discovery and Vertical Slice 1 & 2 the team work by departments, because we were gathering info and making some tests, so it wasn’t necessary create interdepartmental scrums. In this period of the production, leads had a lot of work supervising their departments (pre-production is a chaotic period).
The first delivery, Concept Discovery, was an information gathering in all aspects of the project.
- Code studied viability of different technologies and all the time needed to develop it.
- Art did a studio of possible art styles, type of characters, vehicles, etc.
- Game Design made reviews of multiple kart racing games, looking for its core mechanics.
After this first approach to the game, we decide the theme of the game: Yo-kais. What matches perfectly with the game pillars. The process was a little bit complicated, but briefly, we decided democratically.
Vertical Slice 1 & 2 were a very early prototypes, without nothing similar to a final level or art implmented, very fwe mechanics, etc.
Production
After this prototypes we saw in what direction we had to advance and leads and I decided pass to Scrums productions instead of departments production. For the firsts sprints we had the following scrums:
- Gameplay was responsible of karts behaviours, player mechanics, items and animations.
- Levels had to develop tools for import heightmaps in order to create levels, create props and design and iterate circuits.
- UI designed and developed all menu’s and in-game UI.
- Engine was a full programmers scrum, focused on improved and add funcionality to the engine.
- Art-Heroes was a full artists scrum in charge of modelling and texturized characters and karts.
We have maintained this scrums for almost all production. The only significant change was the dissolution of Art-Heroes scrum once all characters and karts were finished. These artists were moved to Gameplay scrum to help in characters’ animations in the Alpha 2 sprint.
During the Vertical Slice 3, Alpha 1, 2 & 3 we develop the most part of the game. Finishing with this level:
Due to technical problems we had to change the physical engine (remove Bullet and pass to own physics system). This provoked a huge change on the scrums, for the Beta we formed the following scrums:
- Physics: Formed by programmers and designers to adapt the gameplay to the new physics system.
- Items: Focused on polish the items that we had produced till the date.
- Animations: Formed by one programmer and artists to make and implement animations.
- Levels: In the same line that previous sprints.
Post-Production
Thanks God our own physics worked perfectlly (our programmers are the best) and we advance to Post-Production. To face the Gold we change again the scrums to the next structure:
- Gameplay: Polish all mechanics, karts behaviours and physics bugs.
- Levels: Formed by artists and level designers, responsible of enhance levels and make them beautiful.
- Audio: Formed by one audio designer and one programmer, they made all FX and implemented them on the game.
- Particles & Shadows: Formed by programmers and artists, their mission add particles and shadows everywhere.
- QA: In charge of test the game and notify all the bugs or problems found.
Team Dynamics
Sprint Reviews
In every delivery each scrum presented its work. All team members had 1 or 2 slides to explain what he did. This way at the end of every sprint everbody knew the current state of the project and what their teammates had done. Example: Sprint Review Gameplay Alpha 3
Sprint Plannings
After each Sprint Review, in the same class, studio’s CEO gave us a sketch of Backlog. Later I polish that sketch and distributed to all team members. This way every scrum had enough information to planning the sprint.
Every sprint lasted all the days between deliveries, so most of them last 2 weeks. Everybody had to put his availability during the days of the sprint in a common excel. Later the scrum master adjudicated tasks to cover the availability of everybody. Most times this process was too long, and scrum masters had to finish it at home and I try to help them.
Personal Availability for Alpha 1:
During the Sprints
All the tasks were logged in our task management software: HacknPlan. In HakcnPlan we were able of divide tasks in function of each scrum or department, add estimated hours for each task and log the real hours later, stablish dependencies, etc. Everyone should move his tasks once it was completed to Testing and take another one from Planned to In Progress. Only the leaders could move tasks from Testing to Completed independently of the scrum.
HacknPlan for Vertical Slice 3 (Gameplay scrum):
Crunchs
After some problems in the firsts deliveries, merging all the work done by all departments, we decided to stablish 2 days before every delivery where all team members had to be on a reserved college’s clasroom all day. This way we improved the communication and we reduced last minute issues. We have met the 2 days before of every delivery to ensure that everything is ok since the Vertical Slice 3 (included).
Some images during the crunch:
