The Retrospective

So, what lessons have I learned? What would I have done differently? I think to answer this we should go back all the way to the beginning of the year. The things I would change in the opening section of the year would be vast. I came into the course with next to no knowledge of game engines outside of unreal and a surprising reluctance to learn them. I absolutely should have learnt unity during that first game jam and helped Kye with implementation rather than just working on the music aspect. This would’ve helped moving forward as all the future projects were to be in unity anyway. In terms of producer focused learning experiences from this first game jam, it’s difficult to think of any. The format of it being two people didn’t really lend itself to the production side of things, so I don’t think any of my learnings in that regard really started to surface until the second, 4-week game jam.

This was where I started to have some proper learning experiences. Whilst I think I’m a decent leader naturally, due to years of mediating conflicts, keeping a level head and having to fit in with wildly differing social groups, my inexperience in dealing with long term project management and lack of understanding of the developmental pipeline really started to show. My first issue was that I had no idea what a designer was meant to do on a project like this, and whilst my designer wasn’t that forthcoming with an answer when asked I still feel like I failed him slightly by not giving them the chance to properly design the game. The second was that due to a lack of understanding of the pipeline I ended up stuck in a waterfall style of management with the artists being front loaded with work whilst the programmers had to crunch towards the end in order to implement the art. This in hindsight was a gross mismanagement and I should have tried to even out the workload as much as possible and kept milestones in mind throughout.

There were some upsides however, I think I was one of, if not the only producer to use Jira on that project allowing me to accrue some experience with it before the longform dev project, which I think helped me to use and teach it much more effectively. I also think my soft skills stayed solid as I managed to maintain a good rapport with all of the devs from that group and a few I now consider good friends. The fact that I remained humble and honest about my abilities throughout also helped to offset my mistakes and maintain a positive reputation despite my failings. This project was also the beginnings of my experiences as a sound designer, and whilst the results left a lot to be desired (and cost a lot of my dignity), it helped me to begin to develop a niche which not many other devs on the course could fill, which ended up being a vital tool in gaining the respect of future devs.

I’m pleased to say that I took almost all of these failures into account during the final game jam and remedied them relatively successfully. My previous failings with my designer were resolved as my designer for this project really helped me to understand the purpose of the role and they became an absolutely invaluable member of the group as well as becoming a mutual confidant for many the decisions for the project, almost akin to creative and producing directors, a concept which I learned about from the lead producer at creative assembly. Learning from my mistakes on the previous game I also made sure this time around to keep the workload thinly spread. By designating specific aspects of the game to certain devs and keeping the number of issues assigned during sprints proportional to the skill, commitment and current workload of the respective devs I managed to keep everyone ticking along with something throughout the entire five months of development time. Whilst obviously there were no shows and people with intermittent attendance, I managed to encourage all of them to show up at least once and managed to discern the problem devs early on allowing me to factor in their probable lack of output into the schedule. My main goal of creating a finished product was therefore achieved with surprising success. My skill with sound design and audio programming also developed, with me creating and implementing a fully functioning dynamic audio system into the game.

My main points of reflection on this project moving forward would be to firstly, to utilise Jira more effectively. Whilst I understood and used it throughout the project, even introducing sprints from the start which were very effective, the Jira page never felt like much more than a glorified list. I’d ideally like to delve further into its functionality over the summer in order to better understand its capabilities. I also think that whilst I was good at discerning when meetings were useful and when they weren’t and eliminating the latter, I feel like I could have introduced more techniques into those meetings in order to encourage collaboration. The show and tell sprint meetings were exceptionally useful for keeping the devs abreast of the wider project so perhaps some more brainstorming techniques could be used during the pre-production phases and beyond in order to bolster teamwork form the start. More, short term milestones are also something I’d like to introduce, as whilst I had built in milestones for phases of testing and iteration, we rarely hit them to the standard that I set. Whilst this was fine for a time management standpoint as I rarely expected the devs to hit these milestones. It may have been demoralising for some of them and as such, some smaller, less significant milestones that are designed to be met may have been useful.

To conclude, whilst I was initially very nervous about leading a team in a field that I had little experience in, I think that with the help of the lecturers, guest speakers, and some very patient devs, I’ve wound up with a solid understanding of how to produce for games development. Whilst there’s vast room for improvement, I’m genuinely excited to carry on both in the course and beyond. As I’ve gathered most of the members for my team next year, I’m very much looking forward to how I will be able to improve my skills as both a producer and a sound designer, as well as what interesting games I will hopefully be able to be a part of the development process for.

Thanks for reading.