Project EQ is a game where I've been brought on board as a producer. Our team consists mostly of programmers and sound designers. During our alignment exercise, we discovered that the team's main focus is on breaking out of their comfort zones. Members with more sound experience wanted to take up technical tasks, and members with more programming experience wanted to compose, making this the main challenge of this jam.

Given that this is a rhythm game, the lines between roles dissolved further. I created the base task list, and the project lead further broke the tasks up and delegated them within the tech/audio team members. Within the four-week timeframe, we spent the first week staying in our areas of expertise to set up the basic system of the game before switching roles in week two and beyond.

After leading the team through their first weekly stand-up, the team was optimistic about their progress. They proceeded to switch roles and each member began working on their area of interest. I discovered that the way the tasks were broken up was not granular enough, and I noted to the team that WIP tasks were piling up. I urged each member to seek more help from their more experienced counterparts to speed up progress.

Leading the team through their third stand-up and entering the last week, I noted that the issue of most tasks still being blocked in WIP had not improved. While some members managed to find breakthroughs in their areas of learning, I suggested the team pivot back to roles they were familiar with and massively cut scope to finish the game. While the main objective for most members was to learn new areas, the team decided that it was best to finish and polish the game instead.

While the game is currently humble in its game design, sound design, and visuals, it is a representation of the team's technical achievement outside of their comfort zones.

You've Been Summoned! is a game where I've been brought on board as a producer. It started with a team of three: a programmer, an artist, and myself. I led the team through a simple alignment exercise to establish common ground regarding our goals, expectations, and availability. The team concluded that they did not want to expand further. The programmer preferred to use a custom engine he had been developing. We performed sprint planning for the duration of a single day and aimed to keep the scope small.

We did our first stand-up on the second day, following our initial sprint. Within ten minutes we identified a blocker with our artist struggling with custom models, and we made the difficult decision to pivot toward customizing art assets from stock packs, meaning we had to opt out of a specific voting category.

By the end of day two, we experienced another blocker with the custom engine having difficulties with animations,and our artist would be unavailable for an extended period. In the absence of the artist, we decided to cut the scope further, by replicating a small environment multiple times and implementing simple animations controlled by the engine.

On day 3, the programmer and I stepped in to create placeholder art and sound to push the game toward completion. At 3 p.m., we quickly synced up when the artist returned. We had him replace some of the placeholder art we had created, and from 6 p.m. onward, we began the polishing phase, with 17 hours left until the deadline. We also conducted a post-mortem retrospective to reflect on our learnings.

The resulting game may not be the best-looking project we've undertaken, but it represents a culmination of our alignment, sprint planning, tough decisions, stand-ups, and flexibility in supporting other departments.