Producer Blog 1

Hey everyone!

My name is Nolan Owens, lead Producer of Gobby’s Farm! Gobby’s Farm is being designed by 9 developers and is being led by our amazing lead designer Kaeli Becvar. Read her blog posts to see the wonderful work she has put in to make her vision a reality. Now I’ll dive into my process of how I translated her vision into achievable tasks to get this show on the road!

When I got selected to produce Gobby’s Farm, my first thought was what the heck is this game about? Who is Kaeli? But nonetheless I was super excited for the opportunity to work on 1 of 4 games being made in this class. Our class, CAGD 495, is the capstone class of the Computer Animation and Game Design program at Chico State University. Those who wanted to produce a game had to send in their resume and be selected by our Professors, much like applying to a real job. After being selected, Kaeli and I met to get on the same page about the vision of the game and what developers would be needed to complete the game in 7 sprints. At the end of the weekend, Kaeli sent me her new game design document and I had all I needed to get rolling on our backlog.

At Chico State we are taught to produce using the AGILE Scrum workflow. Over the years I’ve gotten pretty confident using Scrum and I wanted to take this opportunity to prove to my professors that I’m ready to produce for a bigger team (my previous projects had 3-4 developers). So to prepare for Sprint 1, I busted out 300 cards on Jira based on the information on Kaeli’s GDD. I also categorized them under 7 Epics that describe features we want in the game. My professor Jeff Underwood taught me to never lay the tracks as you go, regarding project management. So because I prepared a big chunk of the work before we started, Sprint 1 kickoff went very smooth. 

Our team consists of one lead designer, one producer, two 3D artists, two coders, two level designers, one 2D artist/animator, and the class shares two audio designers. Here’s the Sprint 1 points statistics:

As you can tell by the burndown chart, it took a bit for the team to get on our feet and make a dent in our cards. This was due to Kaeli and I’s time spent on pre-production, as well as meeting with the team to explain our expectations and vision of the game. As far as the sprint goal, our goal was to get all the necessary foundations of the project established, like figure out Unity, Github, and Jira, as well as getting a big chunk of the first electronic prototype done. We accomplished this goal and are well on our way to having all the features we want done before the first electronic prototype deadline. 

This sprint, I assigned a pretty good variety of work. Our developers completed models, textures, 2D concept art, annotated maps, blockouts, and more! Here’s some highlights I would like to show off from my team:

I would like to thank my amazing team for a productive first sprint. I couldn’t have this experience of producing my first bigger project without them, and they truly are great at what they do. Onward to Sprint 2! 

Thanks for reading :)