Einar
Game producer
Feb 2017 - Jun 2017
Project information
Description
Einar is a single-player 3rd person hack and slash based on Norse mythology. The player takes on the role of Einar, who is on a quest to kill the inhabitants of a Norse fishing village who are infected by a mysterious material. Use different weapons such as the bow, hammer and axe to clear the village of the monsters.
Nominations
Responsibilities / contributions
Creating and maintaining a high-level planning
- Making and maintaining a product backlog
- Using poker planning to estimate the scope of the project
- Making tough decisions in order to get the product shipped
When I joined the team, the project was at its midpoint of the production phase. The project was just a few months out from shipping. There was no product backlog for the project, so it was difficult to estimate the remaining work and plan out the remaining time. I sat down with the leads, and we went over all the features, using planning poker to get a good estimation from each discipline’s viewpoint. From this meeting, I created a product backlog. During the earlier stages, the project had some issues regarding direction and scope. The result was that on our current course, we weren’t able to ship the game in time. I wrote down the areas that are the most time-consuming, and I looked at areas where we could shrink the amount of work. This ended up with the removal of 2 out of 3 levels while expanding the remaining level. We had the assets for this level, and we were able to ship the game just in time. Einar was downloaded on Steam over 400.000 times.
Implementing and maintaining an agile structure with Scrum
- Restructuring team from disciplines to feature teams
- Organizing weekly sprint planning, retrospective and sprint review meetings
- Improve work flow based on personal and teams experience
When I knew what needed to be done, I made some restructuring changes in the team. For this project, I believe that feature teams work better. However, the way they were formatted when I joined the team, was not working out. There were seven feature teams: Lead, Level, Gameplay & UX, Combat & Camera & Controls, QA, AI, and Characters. The AI feature team was separate from the Characters feature team, which wasn’t working in my estimation. You want cross-discipline communication and collaboration, which you can endorse by making the artists, designers, and programmers work together on specific features. We worked with Scrum, and we had sprints of a week. At the end of each sprint, we had sprint retrospectives for each feature team. Afterward, we had a sprint review with the whole team, where we showed our progress and the state of the game.
Organizing and maintaining meetings and daily tasks
- Tracking day to day tasks in HackNplan and Google Sheets
- Organizing meetings about specifics, keeping them on track, keeping notes
- Communicate between feature teams, teachers and teacher assistants
Scrum was already implemented, but there was room for improvements. There were daily stand-ups, but they were only done between the leads, which is not helping the ownership that you want to accomplish with Scrum. Besides that, you want to keep the whole team informed about what is happening within the team and the product. Furthermore, there were no retrospective meetings. This is something I give great value to because in this meeting you can look back with the team to see how the production went. This is the agile aspect of Scrum, being able to adapt the project and its direction. I was tracking the progress on a day-to-day basis by attending daily stand-ups and meetings and checking HackNplan and Google sheets. For meetings, I was responsible for reserving a space, inviting relevant team members, making sure everyone understood the topic, keeping the meeting on the topic, and writing meeting minutes.
