Hollow Steel
Cyborgs, Big Swords and a whooole lot of scope management.
Development Info
Dev Name: NinjaGame
Released: 2020
Genre: Action
Engine: Unity 2019
Development Time: Three Months
Role(s): Producer, Writer
Key Responsibilities
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Producing for a team of six (One Designer, Two Programmers, Three artists)
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This included Scoping, Time Management, Interpersonal Relations, Milestone Creation & More​
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Creation of project documentation such as Technical Spec, Game Design Document, Gantt Charts and Promotional Materials
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Creation of Bug Testing and User Feedback materials
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Wrote story and worldbuilding documents for designers and artists
Development Goals
A new pipeline: As this was my first project as producer, I was keen to do right by the team. Going into the project I wanted us to create something that we would enjoy making and enjoy playing, while still being attainable in the three month period. This is the project where I became acquainted with the SCRUMM framework.
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Reasonable Scoping: Seeing as this project was totally open to us creatively, it was important to properly consider how our ideas would fit into the three month timeframe we were given. Going into the project I knew I had to temper the teams expectations against reality without causing friction between the team members. We managed to whittle our ideas down to a reasonable set of goals and milestones to work towards.
Postmortem
Balancing for the Team: During the conceptualisation stage I had to keep in mind that our team was very much art heavy, with only one full-time programmer. Our designers had a lot of heady plans - the words "roguelike" and "Large open levels" got thrown around a lot and I could see the programmer visibly sweating from the other side of the room. As producer I felt I had to temper peoples expectations without completely shutting them down - so we worked to compromise.