Vestige

Producer

As the Producer to a team of 9, I had to make sure our scope was manageable and that the team was working on the most vital parts of the game throughout each sprint.  We used Scrum and HacknPlan's Kanban board to track our tasks and stay up to date with what were were working on. Each day I did what I could to make the team smile when the work got tough, as between the tight deadline and important scope cuts, it would have been easy to lose confidence in our game.

And there were some very important scope cuts that we made. Originally, the game was meant to have all 5 stages of greif.  There would be one cryptid per stage, with the final one, acceptance, being the ultimate goal.  Given our timeline, we cut 3 of them to ensure the time we did have was spent on polishing and bug squashing.

System Design

As a System Designer I did my best to make sure the game felt challenging without being unenjoyable.  Though there is still plenty of playtesting to be done to finesse it even further, it's difficult but very doable.  We also tried to write systems that were lightweight but provided more value. For example, in lieu of cutscenes we opted for some parallax images in a slideshow that got the point across better than what would have ended up as a stilted cutscene.

Narrative Design

I also worked to elevate our narrative with our audio logs and a split ending.  The audio logs were hidden by our level designer and dropped by the cryptids after they're defeated. Combined with the opening and closing cinematics, the story is satisfying for those that want it.  While I think there's a lot of room to expand the story and make it clearer, what we were able to accomplish feels right.