Imvi: Echoes of Harmony
Co-Producer | 23-Person Team | 5 Month Period
Imvi: Echoes of Harmony is a third person exploration game built in Unreal Engine 5.4. Use the powers of black and white singularities to fluidly traverse an ancient alien civilization, and uncover your lost memories.
Responsibilities
The Imvi team all together!
From right to left: Chengxiang (Cheng) Li, Haonan Zhang, Lechen Gong, Al Lemerande, Ry Mendenhall, Jabari Belgrave, David Flores, Daniel Leon, Qixuan (Kayson) Liang, Nicholas Young, Kirk Baltzell, Weiyi (Ariaa) Li, Sisi (Stella) Li, Shreyas (Rey) Nisal, Jordan Rauch, Zitao (Oberon) Ouyang, Anders Erickson, Eric Robles, Xuanchen (Alvin) Shen, Aidi (Edrian) Hu, me, Yujia Zhang, Yi (Eren) Zhong.
During my last project, Fastival, I was only responsible for the level design team. In Imvi, I had to scale what I learned up to a much more diverse team. For example, in Fastival, I had a lot of luck with one-on-one conversations, but in Imvi I learned that people preferred what we called "group-on-ones." The leads team would have one discipline lead and producer take a group of friends and have a discussion in a group. This created a safer environment for the group, and led to more productive conversations.
In Fastival, I was mostly reasonable for coordinating with my lead on promising what we could deliver in a sprint. During Imvi, I was now responsible, along with my co-producer, for coming up with all the deliverables for the sprint. We would meet with the leads and then individual team members to figure out what could be delivered. Then we would need to balance that out with what the stakeholders asked for, and then communicating those deliverables through Milestone Delivery Documents. One way we balanced this was by coming up with estimated dates for when work would be done.
Schedule for the Alpha Milestone Delivery Document.
A snapshot of the Beta milestone kanban board.
One aspect of work I focused on was creating and editing the Jira tasks using Agile methodology as a guideline. After coming up with the deliverables with the discipline leads, we would come up with User Stories and Conditions of Satisfaction for those deliverables. Then the lead would go and write the Tasks for the team. I would routinely go through the Jira and remove old or duplicate tasks, and as time went on I would also triage the bugs that came up.
Postmortem
Imvi: Echoes of Harmony was my first time working with a game designer to create a wholly original project on a team. I honed the lessons I learned in Fastival, and encountered brand new difficulties. It was a challenging, but infinitely valuable experience.
"Group-On-Ones"
There were multiple points in the project where it felt like there was a split between the leads team and the rest of the team. We wanted to fix this, but it felt like pulling teeth to get the team to communicate with us. We were having trouble with one-on-one conversations with individuals, especially the artists who were mostly shy international students. So we got a group of friends together so they would feel safe talking, and then had them talk with their lead, with one producer in the back to facilitate the conversation and take notes. This let create a safe space for the team to speak up, and gave us valuable feedback that let us solve our communication issues.
Get It On Screen
In the very beginning, the leads team had a lot of lively conversations, but we would often go in circles. We would worry about the specifics of what a feature would look like, and how it would look, but we would never end up making any decisions. My co-producer and I leaned on Agile methodology to give us a structure for coming up with a feature and getting it on screen. We would outline the feature's User Story to refocus our conversation on the user experience, write the Conditions of Satisfaction for what it would take to get that User Story created for that milestone, and come up with Tasks that explained what work needed to get done to create that User Story. Then we would encourage the team to just get everything on screen, and then reassess the Conditions of Satisfaction at the milestone retrospective.
Buy-In is STILL Hard
One challenge that carried over Fastival was team buy-in. Many people on the team felt lukewarm about the project at best, and many couldn't see how the project would come together. The leads tried working directly with people to help see the vision, but this was time consuming, and ultimately felt like micromanagement. After discussing it with the team, we realized that we were constraining them too much. So, we figured out a way to give the team more freedom in what could be added to the game, and we encourage them to add whatever features they thought were cool. We let half of the team work on whatever they wanted, while the other half worked on core features, then flipped it around so everyone got a chance. Not everything they made got into the final project, but this got almost everyone more bought into the project, because they had something they wanted to see in the final project.
Communicating With Stakeholders
In Fastival, I wasn't responsible for communicating milestone updates with the stakeholders or writing Milestone Delivery Documents for them. In Imvi: Echoes of Harmony stakeholder communication was one of my ongoing responsibilities. I learned how important it was to predict problems that the stakeholders would see, and how important it was not to try say what you thought the stakeholders wanted to hear. For example, we originally wanted to have puzzles, but the mechanics we made simply weren't working with our core mechanics. We were upfront with the stakeholders about this, and recommended a plan for what we could do instead. This ended up being the game's non-linear open world.