No Strings Attached
Producer|Team Size: 15 |Unreal Engine 5
Dev Diary:
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This was my largest project, as it was the culmination of my Master's Degree program at the U. I was the co-producer for this project with a team of 13 passionate developers. Half of our team were international students, so communication was more of a challenge. I made sure that our team focused on letting other's ideas be heard and giving everyone time to speak during meetings.
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I lead bi-weekly stand up meetings to make sure that each and every team member knew what tasks were assigned to them. Along with this I lead multiple inter-disciplinary meetings so that each team member understood each other's pipeline and process. This helped create a team that understood each other's requirements for a task and made it so that no one was working entirely alone and by themselves.
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I prioritized and delegated tasks for the project, while keeping track of them using both Trello for the main team and a JIRA board for myself and the other producer.
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I conducted one on one meetings with team members every so often to check in and see how they were feeling. This meant that I was clued in to how each team member was feeling on a social level, aside from knowing how they were doing in terms of their work output.
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I regularly presented the game's progress to our "executive producers" at bi-weekly Sprint Review meetings. This kept them in the loop and showed our progress. Along with this I presented the game at multiple other events to showcase the game and attract potential players.
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I recorded Motion Capture for the main villain of the game. This was a blast and helped me learn more about the Animation pipeline from a more hands on perspective.
Learning Moments:
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Acknowledging a issue is good, showing actions is better. We had a team member lose days of progress on a task due to poor file management, which in turn made them very upset with me. From this I also learned that it is important to make sure that a team member feels heard when they come to your with a complaint. Not only that but it's equally important to take steps to remedy the problem and report back to the wronged party to show you have heard their complaint.
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Make sure that "quiet" voices are still heard. We had a number of international students on the team who primary language was not English. During development some of them felt like their voices were not being heard in team meetings. I took steps to make sure that they had more time to make their thoughts heard to the team, but this was still a big learning moment for me.
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Production style adapts to the team. Some team members were very productive with a more hands off approach to production. At the same time, some others felt frustrated by this approach and wanted more structure, asking for things such as stricter deadlines and Burndown/Burnup charts. Learning that production is not a one size fit all solution was definitely a learning moment.