Erin and the Otherworld by Druor LLC

- Producer, UI artist

As a druid save your homeland and fulfill your destiny by creating constellations in this roguelite deckbuilder.

I wear many hats in our small team, but my focus is on leadership and management as a producer. I act as our team lead and employ Agile principles, maintain a cohesive player experience as the vision holder, facilitate strong communication across disciplines, perform front-facing pitch and marketing duties, business development and LLC management, and use data collection techniques to monitor and influence progress. My secondary role is doing the UI art and design, with some technical implementation included.

At the end of 2020, I obtained a certification as a Disciplined Agile Scrum Master from the Project Management Institute that I have actively maintained. The techniques I learned via that process have become integral to our team’s workflow. An iterative process is ideal for game development so we can push out updated builds or test new value-creating features quickly. We do one-week sprints for very rapid iterations. This results in very little wasted work time as we can quickly test if a new feature or idea is beneficial, and if not at most a week of work is lost to it. This is also helped by our focus on breaking tasks down into the smallest possible work items. Combined with our “done done” policy of tasks only being considered finished if they’ve been developer done and tester done our rapid testing environment results in rapid value generation. As the team lead I also moderate our work ceremonies, doing daily stand-ups over text in Discord and weekly sprint retrospectives and planning.

In the beginning, our small team of three voted me to be the vision holder for the game. As our team has grown to seven people, we have redone the vote each time so there is unanimous team consent. I work on testing every part of the game and meeting with all disciplines of work - music, art, programming, and design - to ensure there is no clash between concepts. I might notice a discrepancy and then record what it is, why it’s a clash, and then present it to the developer with an idea on how the discrepancy could be resolved but leave it up to them as well on how they want to work it out. A useful exercise I put the team through was having everyone take five minutes to write down all the words they believe fit the tone of the game. I then collected these and wrote them up on a whiteboard for the team and we discussed if they all fit together, crossing out the ones that did not fit so we could have a full team understanding and a tone board to refer to.

One of my strengths is helping people talk to each other. In development, it is important team members are constantly communicating with each other to ensure they have a shared understanding of features, style, and intent. I frequently encourage disciplines to talk to each other, helping to arrange meetings between programmers and designers for example to ensure implementation is being done correctly. Sometimes people don’t know they need to communicate or fail to directly ask questions when it’s clear there is a misunderstanding. I monitor our communication platform, Discord, and will alert people when they should be asking someone for clarification or could get help from another developer. Often people will talk about a new idea or something they’re confused about but fail to make explicit what they mean, so I will ask the right questions to get to the root of what they’re trying to say and repeat it back to them as concise as possible to ensure the meaning is clear.

I am responsible for all the front-facing aspects of the game. I’ve created our presentations, as well as was in charge of our pitch to industry veterans to get our game approved for further development. My work on these front-facing pieces has cemented my skills in public speaking and pitching. I also record and edit all of our trailers and video content, which includes TikTok shorts. I’ve taken advertising courses and applied those skills here, learning on the go what resonates with audiences and how to get people to be intrigued by the game before they play it.

I have managed the team by using efficient data collection and analysis. I take work hour data from daily stand-ups performed over text that I input into an excel burndown chart that I track day to day and week to week to see how the team is doing its work. I also track tasks daily using HacknPlan. These tools allow me to have an accurate view of the team’s status I can use to make adjustments mid-sprint or sprint-to-sprint.

As the team has grown from three people to eleven, including a couple of additional contract workers, the organization and management have grown more complex. Over the course of development, I have adapted the work process to the new team members and team size. I still conduct monthly one-on-ones with every team member to assess how they are doing, what they need, and how I can help them work better with the team, but I no longer check in every day with every member. I’ve adapted our system to have a programmer lead and a design lead, so I can delegate to those leads all the granular tasks I may not have the resources to track. This frees me up to work more on inter-department integration and chart critical paths to achieve our milestones.

As the producer, I have also become the business development manager for our team. I took the lead on sorting out all the legal documents and requirements for forming an LLC. This included working out an operating agreement, setting up business accounts with the state, and handling our newly-formed company’s banking. Keeping tabs on everything involved in owning a company including taxes and expense tracking has given me healthy business acumen.

The final work I was responsible for was organizing and implementing the publishing of our game to Steam. This involved going through legal and tax verifications with Steam, creating the store page, and managing the uploads of our build to Steam’s application distribution system. Altogether this combined work in marketing, version control, and team management resulted in an eye-catching, functioning place to distribute our game to customers.