Immunity Wars

Game project with the purpose of teaching players about the human immune system in its battle against invaders.

Roles: Production, Design, Sound

Team Size: 5

Production Time: 4 months

Engine: Godot

Platform: PC, Steam

Contributions

Held daily 1-on-1 meetings with individual contributors to provide clear project direction and help clarify the scope of assigned tasks.
Coordinated and led weekly team-wide meetings. Facilitated the right conversations to solve misalignments in production; helping to achieve high quality results.
Problem-solved to find project scoping solutions between developer goals and external demands & timeline needs.
Managed task prioritization via Agile methodology and tracking tools
Worked closely with the vision holder to define the game's concept and iterated efficiently on the design through consistent playtesting.
Created the game's levels using team-created and integrated Godot tools.
Produced and sourced over 50% of the game's music and audio FX.

Using previous lessons to work smarter

During the creation of Immunity Wars, the team and myself were able to hone in on our processes. I worked with the same people I had created my previous game with (Elemental Engagements, also published on Steam) and this allowed us to skip any preliminary introductions and get straight into the action. While we were ready for any challenges we might face, our goals had shifted from making a unique and fun game to ensuring our team's coordination and its contributors' development was first and foremost. Come to find out, starting with that almost always makes a great game.

My main responsibility throughout this project was facilitating nearly all of the communication and meetings between the team. This was the smallest team I had been on to-date, and it made this process a unique challenge. Every individual that worked on Immunity Wars had to take full ownership over an area of the project, which meant clear and quick communication was key to ensure quality development. Unlike the previous project, Elemental Engagements, I spent less time building my team member's confidence in their work and communication, and more this time on clarifying the scope of the game and specific task requirements.

Daily, I was in meetings with the team's 2 artists and 2 engineers. This also meant that I directly managed the audio of the game, essentially making sure my own deliverables were able to be met within the set timeline of the game's production. I worked with the lead engineer to also ensure the design of the game was a proactive process to help with playtesting and ideating. Wherever help was needed, I went myself or communicated effectively to get the best person for the job.

Due to the nature of the team being well-acquainted with one another and able to cover each other's weaknesses at all times, we faced very little if any team conflicts. However, scope became an active challenge that we setup processes for in the beginning to help resolve. Early on, we made sure our game was scalable to ultimately allow us to add or cut content based on the trajectory of the team's work. While we originally suspected we may cut 50% or more of the potential content in-time for publishing, we were able to achieve a roughly 25% cut when all was said and done. 3 single player 'campaigns' and 10 levels later, we had a fun and educational game on our hands ready for release.

While I'm proud of my own work and production skills that went into this game, I'm always impressed by the peers I work with that are just as willing as me to put in 110% effort during the entire project. We took the lessons from our previous project and applied them here to great success, not only for the deliverables we had to meet, but also for the team's coordination as a whole. This project helped me know I was going in the right direction with my skills-development as a producer, and I couldn't wait to continue in future endevours.