GRADUATION PROJECT

Project Management for two IGAD Projects

For my graduation project, I took on the challenge of managing two large-scale project teams simultaneously. The projects are as follows:

  • P.A.I.N.T: a cooperative third-person shooter, in which players are tasked with making their way through underground paintball arenas filled with waves of enemies and collecting loot in process.
  • Kari: a management/survival game about the titular character getting stuck on an island. The player is tasked with managing their inventory, surviving the wilderness and finding a way home. 

Both projects have a year-long development cycle, with me being employed in the teams until the start of production halfway through the year. I fulfilled the role of Executive Producer, managing a collective total of 50+ developers. I took a high-level approach, mainly focusing on creating processes and systems for them to efficiently develop their projects.

Kari_Mockup2

Mock-up of a town and the in-game UI of Kari, as illustrated by Chris van Dalfsen.

PROJECT INFORMATION

Role: Executive Producer

Project Duration: 32 weeks

Employed on the project for: 16 weeks

Team Size: 51

Engine: Unreal Engine 4

Platform: PC, PS4

Publisher: Breda University of Applied Sciences

Status: Unreleased; project ongoing until June 2020.

 

P.A.I.N.T_MainMockup

Mock-up of a firefight in P.A.I.N.T, as illustrated by Anette Vávrová.

Core Responsibilities

  • Improving development efficiency through creative implementation of production systems.
  • Analysing the capabilities of the team, and using the data to delegate and plan work accordingly.
  • Improving team understanding of risks through creation of a thorough risk approach and mitigation pipeline.
  • Assisting the team in their day-to-day work by identifying, tracking and mitigating organisational issues.
  • Maintaining the critical path through careful planning and prioritization for both teams.
  • Ensuring product quality through mentoring both teams with previous project experience.
  • Integrating stakeholder feedback into the planning for both teams in order to improve product quality.
  • Communicating and facilitating work from art outsource teams in order to reduce in-house development costs.
  • Raising the quality level of the product through supplying the leads and associate producers with critical feedback and support.

MY CONTRIBUTIONS

A more extensive look at the work I delivered within my core responsibilities

PreProChecklist

Excerpt from the brief checklist I created to assist in long -and short-term planning procedures.

I raised development efficiency through constant iteration of production systems.

My goal for these two game teams was to get them to a level of efficiency where little producer involvement is necessary past pre-production, when my employement has ended. I have found success in this via creation of processes and systems for the teams and continuously iterating based on feedback. While my high-level production work has certainly assisted both teams, with for example the brief deliverable check systems created by me repeatedly cutting sprint planning times in half, I have also not been afraid to get my hands dirty in lower-level work if team feedback and analysis show it to be necessary.

I improved the team's understanding and utilitization of risk management.

Through my risk management strategies, I have been able to actively get both teams to engage with and understand the risk process better, despite previous inexperience with it. My responsibilities included setting up the risk approach and register, as well as mentoring the teams in Prince2. An additional tool I created myself was the mitigation planning document: a Google Sheets file in which the lead team can track which risk mitigation plans need to be handled in which weeks, in order to assist the sprint planning process. My approach has been fruitful, as the team is unearthing a large catalogue of critical project risks with a low time investment.

PartOfRiskPipeline

Part of the risk pipeline I created. The main goal was getting active participation from the team, achieved through a secondary risk sheet, while keeping the actual process for the lead team.

CONCEPT ART GALLERY

Kari_Mockup1_Edited
Kari_CharExplore_Edited
intro_mockup2
PAINT_CharacterExplo2
Concept_052

The various pieces of art work for this page were created by:

Anette Vávrová (tysheaddams.artstation.com)

Manuel Sitompul (https://www.artstation.com/maanu)

Chris van Dalfsen

Eleni Platnaris