Vertical Slice
Role: Producer & Designer
My responsibilities as a Producer included:
- Leading a team using Agile Methodologies
- Creating an extensive backlog with manageable tasks broken up from higher-level stories & features
- Expand and cut project scope based on project velocity
My responsibilities as a Designer included:
- Working alongside Artists, Designers & Programmers to establish game rules, art direction & mechanics
- Producing interactive play spaces
- Balacing & Implementation of assets.
Devlog
I joined the project as a Producer and Game Designer during its first quarter.
During my time as a Producer, I scheduled many meetings using Agile Development practices, setting up scrum boards, checking on progress by other team members, and doing some game design on the side.
For a more detailed outline of the tasks I performed as a Producer and Game Designer, you can view the Personal Assesment Document on the right.
(from October to December.)
Game Design-wise, I would begin using Unreal’s Terraforming tool to create lands with shapes to experiment with. After many iterations, I would settle on composing a large level that would allow the player to wander around the lands for quite a bit of time.
Using the assets that the Art and Tech department provided, I would populate the level with vegetation and wildlife to make the world the level more “alive.”
I requested the Art lead at the time, Tyler Yungmann, to develop materials that the designers can use to paint the terrains for the levels. Once I was provided with the tools, I assigned a physics material component to all the materials used for the environment, to allow the customization of terrain sounds.
After messing with royalty-free sound effects, and implementing them into the project, it made me realize that we were missing something big: Music.
One of the obstacles that I encountered during the development of the project was that we had no one available to compose a soundtrack for our project, fortunately, I reached out to a good friend of mine, whose name goes by Skolture and managed to have them compose the soundtrack.
Whenever they would be stuck, they would contact either me or our tech designer, Quan Nghitran, for feedback. Eventually, we had enough tracks to demonstrate during this stage of the project, and they are open to compose more tracks for the project.
Skolture
After obtaining the music files, I went ahead and implemented the world’s music and SFXs a bit further, with tools that the creative director, Nabil Sekirime, had developed for the designers to use. With this, I was able to implement smooth transitions for overworld music to underwater music, UI SFX, and more.
After many weeks of work, our team has delivered the Vertical Slice of the project.
With Vertical Slice delivered and obtaining the thumbs up to continue with the project, I have stepped down from producer role and joined in as creature artist and cinematics director, as I felt that I can provide a bigger impact on the project by spending more time on engine.
Post-mortem
I could’ve used more time spent on the engine to refine the world’s design a bit more, as I spent more time being the Producer at the time.
I could have assisted more with the design of the game, as they were some cool concepts that I would’ve enjoyed experimenting with and implementing.
I have to allocate better time estimates for submission when producing, even if we have already made back-up submissions.
With this in mind, I will attempt to become better at balancing my time not only as a Producer but for any role that a project may need within my skillset.