Hercule Poirot: The London Case
During my time at Blazing Griffin, I primarily worked on their latest announced project, 'Hercule Poirot: The London Case.' The majority of my work was with the art and design teams and involved planning and creating estimations for each monthly deadline. I used Jira to create and edit sprints, create and assign tasks, and monitor the progress of each employee's work. I then used this information to adjust workload where relevant, and plan for future milestones so that the work would be delivered on time to the highest quality possible.
Below were some of my regular responsibilities:
- Weekly check-ins with all employees working on my current project, including Jira task reviews and adjustments where necessary
- Daily production calls to discuss what would be done that day and any significant upcoming milestones
- Monthly Jira sprint reviews including the creation and editing of future sprints
- Sitting in on meetings to take notes and provide relevant information, as well as ensuring the scope of the project remained reasonable
- Finding the root cause of communication issues and implementing measures to prevent them from reoccurring
- Daily maintenance of the company's bug reporting software, mainly involving assigning bugs to individuals
Train Sim World 2
As the sole producer at Rivet Games, I assisted the team in delivering high quality products for Train Sim World 2. My work mostly consisted of schedule management, leading daily meetings, and ensuring the projects meet their projected milestones. I was also responsible for solving communication issues between teams when they arose.
As my first job in the industry, this role taught me a lot about how different the industry is compared to working in university groups. At a base level they are very similar, but due to team sizes, time constraints, and financing each project develops distinctively.
My responsibilities at Rivet Games were as follows:
- Creating Gantt charts and schedules
- Daily meetings with production team, weekly meetings with management, art, and level design teams
- Working on multiple projects at once, ensuring deadlines are met for each
- Solving communication issues and scheduling conflicts
- Monitoring bug reports and fixes
- Communicating with external companies
Unboxed: Beans' Quantum Adventure
During my third year of university I was the team leader and producer for a children's game made for Heriot Watt University. I was responsible for meetings, scheduling, QA testing, trailer editing, and more. Working with a client made it essential that we kept to our schedule as accurately as we could to deliver the best product possible. Check out our gameplay trailer below!
You are Schrödinger’s Cat, and can switch between three different cat forms; living, dead, and unknown. Each form provides different abilities, and the player must use these to navigate through multiple levels, avoiding dangerous obstacles along the way.
My primary role as a producer mainly involved managing the team's work on a week-to-week basis. I lead 2-3 hour meetings three times a week to keep track of everyone's progress and assign tasks. These tasks were assigned through our group's Trello board and were updated frequently by team members. I also managed a GitHub repository for the project.
Halfway through the project we were given the opportunity to work with 1st years at Abertay University for weekly testing sessions. I led these sessions with my assigned testers and afterwards documented any and all bugs found.
Regarding documentation, I was responsible for research into project methodologies, taking meeting minutes, scheduling and creating a production plan, risk assessments, and collaborating on our game design document.
Examples of these can be found below the gameplay trailer.
Stasis
In my 2nd year of university I produced for my first project, which was a 2.5D exploration platformer named 'Stasis', inspired by Journey and Ori and the Blind Forest.
As the producer of the team I was responsible for task distribution and scheduling. I was also in charge of our team's documentation and trailer editing. I also helped out our designer with asset placement and level arrangement. I ran two meetings per week, one with our supervisors, to monitor our progress and get critical feedback.
In Stasis you play as Kai, a young girl who is getting over the loss of her best friend. You are taken on an adventure through the tall trees of her utopian world in order to find the Great Tree at the heart of the forest. Check out the gameplay video below!