Kibbi Keeper & Kibbi Keeper VR

Producer | 15 Developers | June 2021-Dec 2021

Kibbi Keeper was created by 15 developers from SMU Guildhall’s Cohort 30 senior class for our Capstone project. At Guildhall, Capstone is the class where we get to apply everything we have learned during our first year at Guildhall to make a high quality game with the goal of publishing on Steam. Our team achieved that goal, while navigating new challenges that come with making a game from pre-production to launch, working on a smaller team, and even managing a port to VR.

My Responsibilities

I was one of two producers on our team of 15 developers. Co-production was a great experience and I learned so much from my counterpart. These were some of my responsibilities as a producer:

• Managing a cross-disciplinary team of 15 through pre-production to RTM

• Creating, managing, and communicating sprint plans and milestone schedules

• Communicating and presenting to stakeholders about the state of the game as well as negotiating sprint requirements and expectations

• Managing communication pipelines within our team as well as outside the team with outsourced audio designers and musicians

• Scheduling and efficiently running lead meetings

• Assessing risks, coming up with contingency and mitigation plans, and communicating them accordingly

• Assisting new developer leads as they adjusted to leading their respective disciplinary sub-teams

• Organizing and running playtest sessions as well as interpreting and presenting playtest data

• Managing our backlog using Jira and Excel

• Produced a VR Port alongside the base game

Lessons Learned

Here are some broad lessons I learned during the development of Kibbi Keeper. Instead of detailing each lesson here, I will be posting more information on my Medium blog posts.

1. How to Produce a VR Port: Producing Kibbi Keeper VR alongside the base game provided a unique challenge. To successfully develop a VR port, we had to carefully understand the risks of VR, develop the MVP, and slowly work from there, while maintaining the development of the base game. On top of learning more about VR, the port also taught me how to juggle multiple projects.

2. How to Explore an Unfamiliar Genre: Kibbi Keeper was a new genre to our entire team and to Guildhall. During this project, I learned the importance of market research, continuous brainstorming, and commitment to finding the fun.

3. Everyone Leads Differently: I was lucky enough to get to work with some incredible leads during the development of Kibbi Keeper. Of the six of us, three of us had leadership experience from Snowpainters. The other three had not been leads at Guildhall yet. Kibbi Keeper taught me more about how leads have different leadership styles and how to best support them.

Click here to find out more about Kibbi Keeper!