The past week or so have all about quality assurance and ensuring a smooth presentation of our game: Vapor Rage. Its all about the small details, from bug fixing and smooth cinematic transitions to UI, we have been easing our way from production into a post-production stage of development that has been focused on producing a polished product.
Release Manager - As the Release Manager, its all been about putting in late nights and work into just about whatever has been needing our help most. This weekend saw a number of us putting in around 10-12 hours towards playtesting and last minute tweaking in preparation for our presentation. We ran into a long list of things needing to be tweaked, but little by little we tackled it all together.
Aside from the last minute stretch of production, Ernesto and I have mainly carried on doing what we've been doing all of production: recording individual team members' hours of work into our burn down charts, making decisions about what should or should not be prioritized for each team, leading producer meetings to assess problems or bits of work that still needed to be taken care of, and checking in with developers to ensure a healthy working environment.
I think one of the biggest issues Ernesto and I ran into revolved around the distribution of work on this project. We had made several attempts to integrate developers into the parts of production that most needed help, but there's only so much that you can do to incentivize people to help out with what some felt as the less desirable bits of production. The work got done, but as you can see on our burn down chart, we unfortunately weren't able to curb a sense of crunch for a few of our most involved developers.
That is not to say that we had a rampant problem with laziness or anything like that: I assure you that our team stayed consistently strong and productive throughout the entire course of this project. I think we just ran into issues of scope that -while mainly achieved in the end product- certainly meant that a few developers had to take on what I would describe as the roles/work hours of multiple people all at once.
Producer of Scene Art and the Producer of Audio Engineering - This was perhaps the most demanding part of my job on this project given that I had ended up mainly alone in my responsibilities. I had teams, but whether it was because of my decision to take on work that was not getting done fast enough or because of my team members' attention being pulled away towards more important parts of our game, I ended up putting together between 70 to 80% of the scene art and nearly the entirety of the audio system we implemented into the game. Its been a lot of work as can be clearly seen on our burn down chart, but its work I'm very proud of (especially the last minute status effects for hazards I made that felt like a natural combination of my Scene Art and Audio Engineering roles). I just hope that the music and the visuals are what people remember when it comes to the game.
Comments