Afterville
Developed in Unreal Engine 4
Role: Producer
Project Duration: 3 Months
Team Size: 6 (1 Producer, 2 Game Designers, 1 Artist, 2 Programmers)
Platform: Windows PC
Project Duration: 3 Months
Team Size: 6 (1 Producer, 2 Game Designers, 1 Artist, 2 Programmers)
Platform: Windows PC
Summary
Afterville is a third-person, narrative-based PC game in a post-war small town where the player takes on the role of the Mayor’s Assistant. While maintaining peace in the community, the player will explore and rediscover its inhabitants, balance the limited budget, make sustainable or community-based choices, and listen carefully to the voices of Afterville’s people to maintain peace and restore lost connections by passing proposals that will slowly rebuild the town.
Responsibilities
- Drove the communication and organization of day-to-day tasks and scheduling for the team's priority feature list using a 5-sprint production plan while adaptively applying agile principles for a narrative-based third-person PC game
- Maintained the production schedule, tracked development progress, and defined deliverables with team and stakeholders
- Facilitated weekly meetings with stakeholders on development progress and adjusting team's tasks around the production schedule to deliver the project on time and within scope
- Whiteboxed, prototyped, iterated on level blockout, and lighting optimization for town environment implmentation
Challenges faced as the Producer
The main challenge for me was to negotiate with one of the game designers about rescoping the game content when the team was facing a tight deadline, only having 1 artist on the team to produce 3D assets and was the first team for team members developing in Unreal Engine. After spending hours on discussions and revisiting the project goal, we succeeded in reaching an ideal balance between the mechanics and narrative, successfully rescoping the game into a more realistic development timeframe.
Another challenge was to efficiently manage my time as a producer while assisting with level design midway through development with one of our designers being unavailable. Having no previous experience with level design, I collaborated with the other game designers to share my workloads during production when I was working on prototyping and iterating on the town's level and learning how to efficiently use lighting in Unreal Engine to optimize loading times.
Once I was done with the first few iterations of prototyping, implementing art assets, and experimenting with lighting and exposure, I began to take on more main production tasks while finalizing the level to pass over to the programmers for integration and polishing. This allowed our team to deliver the project on time and within scope requirements.
Lessons learned from working on the projects included how to iterate for fast-level design and prototyping, earlier playtesting would've helped with polishing the gameplay experience, and frequent communication with the team ensured completed tasks were met.
Another challenge was to efficiently manage my time as a producer while assisting with level design midway through development with one of our designers being unavailable. Having no previous experience with level design, I collaborated with the other game designers to share my workloads during production when I was working on prototyping and iterating on the town's level and learning how to efficiently use lighting in Unreal Engine to optimize loading times.
Once I was done with the first few iterations of prototyping, implementing art assets, and experimenting with lighting and exposure, I began to take on more main production tasks while finalizing the level to pass over to the programmers for integration and polishing. This allowed our team to deliver the project on time and within scope requirements.
Lessons learned from working on the projects included how to iterate for fast-level design and prototyping, earlier playtesting would've helped with polishing the gameplay experience, and frequent communication with the team ensured completed tasks were met.