In 2014, I was one of just twenty people selected to participate in the inaugural year of the Denius-Sams Gaming Academy, an intensive, post-baccalaureate game development leadership fellowship led by Warren Spector. The purpose of the program was not to teach how to make games—knowing how to make games was a prerequisite—but to foster good leadership practices through a realistic work environment supported by the mentorship of industry professionals and the safety net of a university environment.
Here is an article written for the Houston Chronicle about our program:
This video contains interviews with faculty & participants about the DSGA
The Calm Before was the game we developed during the first year of the DSGA. My roles on this project ranged from Producer to Content Designer, Level Designer, Systems Designer, & Sound Designer.
Left to right: WIP of level design for The Island in Unity editor, High-level terrain concepting, analog kanban production board 1 & 2
Though I filled many roles in the development of this project, I'd like to talk a little about my time as Producer. In the final stage of development, I was given the role of Producer and tasked with bringing the project together and creating a final product that we'd be proud to release.
As the nature of the the DSGA created a constantly rotating leadership, the state of our organization and task tracking was a bit messy. Our Jira had gotten bloated and wasn't being used consistently by our independent contributors. Our team was suffering from burnout and we had less than two months to turn out a finished product.
With that in mind, I decided to take things more analog for the final production sprints--after trimming down our high-level Jira tasks to the essentials, I created a physical kanban board of tasks, in the form of player stories, organized loosely by priority. I then gave our IC's the opportunity to take ownership of individual goals and gave them the agency to delegate minor tasks within those goals.
This tactic was extremely successful. Giving choice and ownership to our IC's increased their overall motivation significantly, and we were able to put out a product that we were ultimately proud of.