Snowpainters

Lead Producer | 40 Developers | Jan 2021-May 2021

Snowpainters was created by 40 developers from SMU Guildhall’s Cohort 30 class for our Team Game Production 2 (TGP2) class. The main goal of TGP2 is to learn how to communicate on a large, interdisciplinary team. Our team accomplished that and more as we were greenlit to publish Snowpainters on Steam!

Responsibilities

I was the Lead Producer for Snowpainters. Some of my roles and responsibilities included the following:

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

• Communicating with our stakeholders about the state of the project

• Presenting milestone progress to our stakeholders and to the entire cohort

• Scheduling and running lead meetings as well as daily SCRUM of SCRUMS

• Organizing the team by delegating work and resources with help from the lead developers

• Facilitating communication between sub teams with the help of five direct report producers

• Assessing risks and coming up with contingency plans

• Produced the launch to Steam

Lessons Learned

While I learned many lessons while working on Snowpainters, these are my top 3:

1. Be Confident: At the start of Snowpainters, I struggled with being a confident leader. I had very little experience leading large groups of people and often would come off as unsure of myself when addressing our entire team. Over the course of development, I found my voice, which helped reassure my team that we were on track.

2. The Power of Prioritizing: During our beta milestone, before we knew that we would publish, the game designer (GD) and I would sit down at the end of each work-day and prioritize what still needed work to get us up to the level of quality we needed to be green-lit to publish. We had a large list of final tweaks, items to polish, and bugs to fix at the end of the project and it would have been easy to let that overwhelm our team. Instead, we organized the list by what would be the most commonly seen or most prevalent bugs every afternoon in the last few days of development. This would help our developers stay on track and eventually helped us reach the quality mark to publish.

3. Timebox Conversations About Major Mechanics: Something that I could have done better during the development of Snowpainters is timeboxing and “shelfing” conversations about major decisions. During late development, our lead team made the decision to cut a major mechanic in our game. In the days leading up to that decision, there were many conversations that took place about the reasoning behind cutting or keeping the mechanic. Often these conversations were wasting our meeting time and lead us nowhere. We were stuck spinning our wheels on this decision for days. Something I could have done was to timebox the conversation, spend less time debating the existence of the mechanic, and more time testing it out. This would have made our decision making easier, and it would have saved us valuable time in our lead meetings too.

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