Producer’s Quandry(week 3)

The title is maybe a bit exaggerated but being producer really puts you in certain kinds of positions where you have to make decisions and deal with the potential consequences.

This week has been a challenge for me, because I easily feel that I am not doing anything useful, even though I know that I have to do the things that makes the production progress without hick-ups. Allowing the team to work without being interrupted. It is definitely different from doing code which is what I am used to doing. I am everywhere, explaining things and making sure that people have work to do which makes me feel that I am not doing anything.

The decision that I talked about in the beginning was the decision to change the perspective of the game from a top-down one to a isometric one. The consequence of this decision will be divulged in the following weeks but the worry is of course if our artists can manage to get polished art assets for GGC. That perspective needs more details and more animations that the top-down did not need. But hopefully since we changed relatively early in the production we will pull it off.

This is the top-down perspective that we have at the moment:

One of our artist had a character(from a previous project) that had the perspective that we were deciding to change to so we put him in the game to see how it would look like.

After putting him in the game we felt that we could do this.

So what have I actually done this week? the most important thing that I have done this week (except the decision of perspective change) is playtesting the game all the time. It really helped finding bugs and things that did not work. It made the iteration of things easier that the programmers fixed something and I tested it and said if it worked of if it needed more work. This quick way of exchanging information makes the game progress a lot more quickly than implementing everything essential and then playtest it.

What have I learned during this week:

Tough decisions have to be made. What will make this game better?
I definitely understood the value of playtesting a lot during the development. Things are discovered early and taken cared of.
I have to get used to the fact that I am not a coder in this project and I have to be the one that makes things flow flawlessly.

I can’t wait to see what next week will teach me, but it sure is exciting. 🙂