Junior / associate producer interest in Game design
Team size = 8 people
Genre:
Multiplayer Tactical First-person Shooter
My Role:
Product Owner & Game Design Generalist
My Role as product owner
Vangandar was my graduation project, were in 2 months I was the Product Owner of a team of 8 people that I handpicked for this project. We created a multiplayer tactical first person shooter game. The game pits two teams, Odin’s Guardians (Defender) and Loki’s Children's (Attacker), against each other in a search and destroy game - mode.
This bullet point list will show all the tasks I took as the Product Owner:
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Primary Responsibility: Led the team to the game vision was and guided the team towards the milestones.
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Communication: Collaborated with the Scrum Master, organized stand-up meetings, and reviewed tasks on the Jira board each Monday, so that the team had task for that specific sprint. Update documentations and having retrospectives with the team and school mentor. Creating a private Discord server for development communication.
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Clarity and Alignment: Developed a Game Design Document (GDD) to give a clear vision of the game and why we should do certain ways to complete the project.
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Project Milestone 1: Creating a team with good knowledge about the tactical shooter or first person shooter.
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Project Milestones 2: Network system in early stage working
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Project Milestones 3: Created builds for all the milestones for playtest session but as well for milestone deadline (First Playable, Alpha, Beta and code release)
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Marketing:
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Game Cover
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Documentation
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Installation for Itch.io
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Challenge: Sustaining work morals and pushing the team to be creative with there work while still managing the deadlines.
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Solution: My solution for sustaining the work morals is first of all in the scouting phase. I handpicked students were I thought could fit both for the outcome of the game but also would work nicley in the team they would be put in. My main focus was
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Communication
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Creativity
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Skills in that craft the student wanted in the feature to work with
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Another thing to sustain work moral is to make the working days fun but still keeping it professional. By having after work and just talking about the game makes huge difference when it comes to development of the game. If new mechanics or ides came in place, having retrospectives or special meetings will effect that the team feel heard, creative and have good working morals. One key point is also to have a lot of play sessions within the dev team. A motto I have is "If you don't like to play the game, why would somebody else want to play the game". This made the development of the game so much more fun, feeling like we were the expert of the game and always looking how we could improve the games mechanics, communication and overall the feel of the game helped so much.
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Perseverance: Maintained team motivation and alignment. Updating Jira board for task so the team always had something to do and maintaining good team work to craft an exceptional game
Beside Product Owner I was all over the place from, Level designer, Sound designer and for most Game Designer in this project though my intention for this project was Product Owner.
