Boat Train
Chess-Based Roguelike | 8 People | Producer
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ROLE
Producer
PROJECT SUMMARY
Developed by nonprofit organization The Monkey Barrel as a practice in long-term development, Boat Train is a chess-inspired Roguelike game where your objective is to complete a series of randomly generated levels, capturing pieces along the way in order to accumulate an army.
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As Producer for Boat Train, I managed the overall development of the game product from ideation to its eventual publication on Steam. Through its development, I learned a great deal about long-term processes and blocker resolution.
Long-Term Production
I led the development of Boat Train using standardized agile methodology procedures, including daily stand-ups and weekly scrum meetings. By increasing transparency across all fronts, I encouraged team accountability and continuous progress. This was staged utilizing the popular task-tracking software Trello's Kanban board features.
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This development process stretched from initial ideation to eventual publication. As a result, I was engaged in developing a task roadmap that accounted for cross-dependencies and estimated time requirements (as determined through communications with team leads.)
Resolving Development Blockers
No development process is seamless! Although I took it up as my responsibility to prepare for and prevent any development hiccups, we encountered several unforeseen issues along the way. Several team members had to drop out of the project throughout its development, leaving us with less overall firepower than we'd expected. This put us at a significant disadvantage of hitting our target date.
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In order to resolve this dilemma, I worked alongside my team to evolve the scope of the project with respect to our current circumstances. Several cutbacks were made in order to ensure that the final product would get shipped on-time and with proper polish. I also negotiated with relevant stakeholders to prolong the development process and ensure that the game got all the time it needed to bake. On the occasion, I outsourced some development processes to take some strenuous pressure off of my team.
Publication Efforts
Our ultimate goal as a team was to publish Boat Train on steam. As Producer, my responsibilities for this project included coordinating all publication efforts and the development of publication materials. I coordinated efforts between the art team and outsourced help in creating visual assets and video materials that would go into marketing the final product.