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.