Fastival
Level Design Producer | 47-Person Team | 4 Month Period
Fastival is an arcade racing game built in Unreal Engine 5.3. Race through three gorgeous topsy-turvy tracks against AI or in local multiplayer. Tracks are made even more exciting as players activate short cuts, traps, and use items to get ahead.
Responsibilities
One of my daily check-ins with Kirk (left) and Jon Jon (right) as they design Track 3.
The theme for my time as Level Design Producer was “teamwork.” Every day the level designers and I would Scrum, then the leads team would meet and discuss those Scrums, and then I would check in with the team throughout the day and clear up blockers.
As I went throughout the day, I would check in with the Level Design Lead to discuss our milestone goals, and whether we were on track or not. I would then communicate our progress and risks to the Lead Producer who assembled them into a Milestone Delivery Document for the stakeholders.
Anona the Level Design Lead (left), myself, and Anders the Lead Producer (right) at a daily Scrum of Scrums meeting.
Checking in with a QA test about a bug Danny (right) found.
In addition to being the Level Design Producer, I was also the Quality Assurance Producer. I assembled a QA team made up of level designers who had bandwidth to spare and asked them to track bugs they found in Jira.
Postmortem
Fastival was my first large team project, and my first project in a lead position. Every day I was learning on the fly as situations evolved rapidly. I learned a lot about myself and game development along the way.
Communication is Key
My experience working retail at a swimming pool supplies store taught me a lot about communication. Fastival taught me how much more I had to learn. I realized that while I’m good at listening, and tailoring my message to different people, there were other things that undercut my abilities. I learned I can jump to conclusions, and that I can sometimes sound sterner than I mean to be. Now that I know about these bad habits, I actively work on them every day.
How to Have Fun
On that note, it’s worth mentioning I’m a very serious person. I think this is a good thing, but sometimes it can be off putting. Fastival taught me that, even when things are stressful, it’s important to have fun and lift spirits. You can be as stressed as you want, but you shouldn’t let that bleed into your team. I’ve learned to temper my seriousness with jokes and laughter, and I’ve seen great success since.
Buy-In is Hard
It can be hard to get everyone on the same page. Everyone I worked with is incredibly talented and passionate, but sometimes this means they’re more interested in their own work than teamwork. I learned not to take this personally, and that everyone just needs an opportunity to find something they’re passionate about to work on. Dissatisfaction with work usually isn’t a team member problem, it’s usually a leadership problem.
Part of a Whole
I would spend a lot of time on my feet every day (another thing that working retail prepared me for, even if I didn’t expect to use it here). I would check in with the level designers, and as I did, I would learn about a dependency. Maybe a white box needed to be replaced with a specific asset. Then I would go and talk to one of the other leaders or producers for help and we’d figure out how and when to get the problem solved. While I had worked on teams of different sizes and abilities, Fastival demonstrated to me just how complicated working on a large team can get.
Jira Can Get Messy
As the QA producer it was my responsibility to ensure that bugs were found and then tracked in Jira. However, nothing could have prepared me for just how many bugs there were. The way I set up Jira to track bugs quickly became outdated and I had to revise it a couple of times during the project. I learned it was important to “triage” the Jira – take out old and completed bugs – and that I couldn’t just present a tsunami of bugs for programmers to fix. This was a valuable experience, and informed how I would tackle QA going forward.