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KATHARSI

DETAILS

OVERVIEW

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Role(s)

Producer
Game Designer

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Team size

15

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Engine

Unreal Engine 5

Project length

32 weeks

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Genre

Puzzle-Adventure

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Platform

Steam

Summary

In this project, I was the producer for a team of 15 developers who released a puzzle-adventure game on Steam using Unreal Engine 5.

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My work

  • Organising a team of 15 from concept to release for a year-long project

  • Creating the team structure with a team contract

  • Running SCRUM rituals and other team meetings (peer reviews, show & tells, teambuilding)

  • Setting the goals and deadlines

  • Facilitating communication within the team

  • Managing the scope of the project

  • Establishing the QA and playtest pipelines

  • ​Communicating with stakeholders​

  • Maintaining the team's Codecks board

  • ​Updating the Steam store page

  • Assisting with the game's design

GAME TRAILER

TIMELINE

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PROJECT CONTRIBUTIONS

Scope Breakdown

To guide the team and give them a direction to head towards, I created a scope breakdown of all the features in the game. In the process of making this, I also designated which people were in the various feature teams.

 

This was created near the start of pre-production and was used to set the sprint goals and milestones. During the weekly build reviews, we compared the state of the build against this scope breakdown to determine what still needed doing. 

 

We moved on from this in favour of the VA asset list â€‹â€‹near the start of production as we no longer needed a macro plan and instead needed more micro planning.

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Katharsi VA Asset List

QA Plan & Reports

To maintain the health of the build, I created an extensive QA plan that defined the responsibilities of the QA team, the testing schedule, how to track bugs and bug classification. 

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This plan was created following research I conducted by reading the book Game Testing: All in One. Having weekly QA testing and a sturdy way of reporting bugs was instrumental in being able to release a stable build.

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I set up bug tracking in Codecks since we were already using it for the SCRUM board and this avoided the need to become familiar with another software. The QA reports were shared during the stakeholder update presentations.

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Katharsi Release MoSCoW to-do list

Post-mortem

To wrap up the project we had a post-mortem where we discussed the highs and lows of the project and what we could take away from it.

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To speed up the process, I made a survey for the team to fill in which would give me the necessary data to find the top 5 best and worst parts of the project. From there, we discussed these topics in person, mainly regarding how we could have done things differently. 

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Katharsi Early Pre-Production Scope Breakdown

VA Asset List

With help from the lead VA, I made an asset list for all the art assets in the game. The spreadsheet has several sheets for each specialisation (character, environment, animations, etc) and is set-up so that it is easy to update your progress.

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This list was used by all the artists throughout production and I was able to estimate the remaining art scope thanks to it.

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Katharsi Example QA Report

Release MoSCoW

In the weeks leading up to the full release on Steam, we made and tested a couple release candidates. The quality of these release candidates was not where the team wanted them to be and this was quite stressful and demoralising. 

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The main concern regarding these builds was that there were still many small issues that really needed to be fixed but they were too small to be covered by the SCRUM board.

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To bring some hope back to the team and give everyone a clear to-do list, I went through the most recent release candidate and noted down absolutely everything I could. I made sure to prioritise them following the MoSCoW system with everything in the Must column being critical to the release of the build.

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In the wake of this list being created, there was suddenly much more focus and determination from the team to get everything done before the release.

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Katharsi Post-mortem Conclusions

TAKEAWAYS

  • All production work should be adapted to the needs of the team and should be iterated upon frequently.

  • Waiting to have data to make a scope decision may take too long and sometimes you have to follow your gut.

  • Ensuring that the whole team is familiar with the software you're using is crucial to efficient project management.

  • Being aware of everyone on the team and available for their feedback/concerns will allow issues to be spotted sooner.

  • A strong QA plan with regular testing is key to having a healthy build and releasing a stable game.

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