PARCELS
Platform: Custom C++ Engine
Duration: 8 Months
Team Size: 8
Role: Product Manager
Game Designer
Download:
Overview:
Parcels is a 2.5D point-n-click narrative adventure game that follows Greg, a deliveryman who has wound up in an unknown place. Deliver parcels and talk to your recipients to learn about the world that you woke up in and all the strange happenings around the world!
RESPONSIBILITIES
- Ensure project time line is adhered to.
- Ensure tasks and milestone deadlines are accomplished to a high standard.
- Create meaningful narrative and gameplay elements to compliment it.
- Bridge gap between artists, programmers and designers to ensure a cohesive vision is achieved, within the team's means.
- Advisor for team's design decisions regarding our custom engine's capabilities.
CHALLENGES
- This was the first time I had done a project on a team size this big, a total of 8 people across multiple disciplines.
- Since we were working on a custom C++ engine, the completion of the game was completely reliant on the programmer's ability to produce an engine that the designers and artists could use.
- Most, if not all of the team members had little to no experience in developing a game from start to finish, so I had to help guide the team while not being too over-bearing.
PRODUCTION PROCESS
Parcels is the first major game project during my time in Digipen Singapore. This project was meant as a stepping stone for students to experience a studio environment and work across multiple disciplines. Here, designers, artists and programmers form a team and develop a game from conceptualization to being a finalized product. Agile Development methodologies were first formally introduced here to us and we adopted scrumban as our framework.
As the Product Manager, I was tasked to manage the team's taskings and overall project progress. I hold a weekly team wide meeting with the respective leads to get a grasp on how the individual teams were doing. I also tasked the leads with engaging in scrums every three days with their respective members, and to immediately highlight issues if any team members faces them.
TASK TRACKING
In this project, we were given three specific review dates in our projects which I converted to Milestones. Further splitting it up into sprints and managing tasks from the sprint backlog.
Utilizing the Kanban Tool - Trello, I setup with a customized template which allowed individual members to see their own tasks alongside others.
Boards were split like so: Sprint Backlog, In Progress (By Name), To Review, Done, Issues, Resolved.
.png)
TEAM HEALTH
To ensure team member's mental and physical well-being, I conducted regular team health meetings to sit the team down and talk to them one on one. This aims to get a sensing on their current commitments outside of the project, and also see if there is anything that I could do to support them. (Either offloading some work, or assigning lesser tasks for them for the sprint)
