Dodge Roll
Engine: Unity
Role: Producer
Duration: 3 months (1 semester)
Dodge Roll is a deck building rogue like game where the player must wander the land fighting monsters with magical spells. Players will have to collect new characters to build their strength and attempt to defeat the final boss.
My main job during this project was to oversee a team of 8 people that included artists, programmers, designers, and sound designers. I organized meetings with team leads and individual team members as well as update meetings with our professor who acted as a publisher.
Planning work
To help schedule work and make sure all the team members were on task I created a Trello page that everyone had access to.
During the project the team used Scrum techniques where each time we had class, we would do daily stand ups and check ins to make sure everyone was on track to finish their tasks on time. If there was an issue I was made aware of these and could then follow up with the team member who had the block as well as the team lead to make sure we figured out how to resolve the problem.
Each sprint lasted for 2 weeks and each team had a section dedicated to their tasks on the Trello page. Task cards where assigned tiltes, explanations of what the task was and a due date. As tasks were worked on and completed they moved between the various lists. After each sprint was over all the tasks went to an archive so we if there was a similar task that came up again we had notes and a sense of how long it took, as well as issues that came up.
Problems that Arose
One major problem that arose within the team was certain team members not completing tasks on time and overall not matching the same amount or quality of work done by the rest of the team. To help fix this I had multiple meetings with the team member and raised concerns about the issue. After being told by them that they would get more work done and complete their tasks I scheduled more personal check ins with that person and with the rest of the team.
Unfortunately the aforementioned team member who was not completing tasks continued to do so. I decided to try another technique and see if they wanted to work in a new team and were not getting work done because they did not enjoy the work. This approach ended up working in this situation. If there were not other team members that had the skills to complete the tasks my option that I was weighing was to have another meeting with them and daily progress check ins which I had not beein doing since class did not meet everyday and had no other issue with the rest of the team getting tasks done. If that too had failed I would have had to speak to the professor about cutting them from the group since their continued lack of work and obvious dislike of the project was hurting the moral of the team.
Things that went well
Many things went well and in the 3 months we had to work on the project, we ended up with a fun game. We had successful alpha, beta, and gold builds, along with working better and better as a team as the semester went on. I was able to create a solid communication line between the various teams and helped bridge the gap between artists, programmers, and designers in what each team needed from the others to be successful.
I was able to keep the Trello page organized in spite of the tasks needing to be juggled around. The scrum meetings and the personal one on one checks ins were one of the main reasons the team was able to work smoothly together without much idle time as team members waited for other tasks to be finished.