PRISM OF YOU
Lead Producer
May 2024 - Present
The Game
Prism of You is a 3D resource management simulator set in the Prism, the inner world of the player character. The entropic creatures of the Prism, representative of emotions, are in constant flux. Find the harmony that exists between order and chaos.
Prism of You is in development as a
MFA thesis project and expects expo exhibition in
May 2025. I expect to continue producing this project past May for full launch and festival submissions.
Takeaways
Different types of games have vastly different production processes. A game whose hallmark is deeply-integrated, concentrically-designed systems does not have the same milestones as a linear game with levels and discrete mechanics, and cannot be treated as such.
A huge part of producing effectively for any given team member is knowing them well enough as people to know how to frame criticism, which degree of oversight they prefer (and which they need), and how to recognize signs of burnout. Beyond that, knowing the aspects of their work that they take the most pride in can help to guide difficult decision-making when evaluating what to cut and what to keep.
Not every group of team members finds meetings productive. However, when possible, accountability is significantly easier to stress when face-to-face.
“Circumstances” are unavoidable. Building overflow time into a production schedule is one effective way to mitigate the delays that come from Circumstances -- but overflow time should be used in moderation with interventions or sit-downs when necessary.
The production role should fluctuate extensively based on the demands and short-term insufficiencies of the team, but without intentional focus on production responsibilities and time management first and foremost, it’s extremely easy to take on too much and see production suffer as a result.
Virtually nobody benefits from a producer being hesitant to ask questions or approach team members one-on-one.
My Contributions
As the sole producer on Prism of You, my key responsibilities include the following:
Leading a hybrid team of 26 volunteer students and recent graduates in the development of a concentric
systems-based game
Creating and enforcing both
high-level production schedules and intricate
weekly tasking schedules using my own documentation templates for maximum usefulness to the team
Tasking every team member for each week-long sprint and administering mid-week check-ins with individuals and teams as needed
Conducting six major milestone
playtests, recording playtest data, and
compiling all administrators’ data into a presentation to be given to the entire team
Organizing regular
team bonding events, kickbacks, and game nights to foster social bonds between team members and “give back” for the work they put into the project as volunteers
Writing meeting
agendas for and
notetaking during weekly meetings for each discipline
Art by Caroline Jia
Issues & Responses
Onboarding. How do you simultaneously onboard twenty-something new recruits fast enough to meet milestones and comprehensively enough to avoid wasted or unrepresentative work?
My solution was to organize one-on-one meetings with every member of the team to discuss information crucial to my production planning, from cut-and-dry statistics like their expected time commitments to more personal matters like signs of burnout and preferred tones of communication. I collected this information and compiled it into a spreadsheet shared with only myself and my director, for constant reference as we saw performance peaks and troughs throughout the semester. This onboarding process took the onboarding burden off the director and leads, accelerated when we could start assigning tasks, and gave me the background knowledge necessary to be properly reactive in response to team member behavior.
Consistency. It’s proven difficult to keep the team motivated through our development cycle, particularly due to the nature of their roles as volunteers and the game’s systems-based quality. Most disciplines work “quietly”, with their contributions not showing up where external playtesters could see them for several sprints. This, combined with everyone’s rigorous courseloads and other various commitments, has caused some branches of the team to struggle with consistency and timeliness in completing work. My director and I both have gone through ample trial and error to combat this, and have mostly opted for scheduling one-on-one conversations with individual team members to discuss burnout, overworking, and expectations going forward. Additionally, we schedule regular team events and optional all-hands meetings to encourage connection and boost morale; the latter is especially geared towards artists, whose work can be celebrated by other disciplines before it can be implemented ingame.