Porcuball
Role
Producer and UI Artist
Game Engine
Unity Engine 4
Platform
PC (Windows)
Development Time
7 Months, 2018
Team Size
20 People (2 Designers)
Porcuball Trailer
Screenshots
Roles and Responsibilities
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I worked as part of an art concept team that handled the initial concepts for UI and HUD elements. Later on into the project, I took over the role of producer as the previous one moved fully into a level design capacity. That put me in a position where I needed to quickly adapt and catch up. This helped me to establish the soft skills for communication as well as hard skills for scheduling for a large team.
UI Concept Artist
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This required constant communication with the art lead to make sure to stay within the style guide and color scheme. I drew concepts for proposed power-ups, buttons, menu layouts, and menu flow. All of them stuck to a theme of paper craft, nature, and simplicity.
Main Menu in the final shipped build
Original Main Menu during early prototypes
Pause Menu
Production
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I stepped up for the previous producer that took up the mantle of being a full time game designer. This meant that I had to quickly get up to speed and find a way to manage a 20 person team in order to hit the last three milestones. I constructed a sheet of game and steam page assets and deadlines for them to hit the Beta milestone for the Steam release. I worked to coordinate team work meetings as the team developed this game outside of core hours. We had work sessions primarily for planning, polish, and integration of different game elements. It is also where the majority of level design was discussed and planned for. I also helped to set up the Steam page along with the Half Baked Data LLC to publish the game. As part of this, I coordinated with the second art lead, Thomas Mouchawar, to get the promotional materials assembled, as well as Alexander Koumandarakis, the systems design lead, to get the build finalized.
Ending Credits
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I helped to concept the credits level alongside the game designer, Ryan Stonecipher. It’s the only major level that I ended up contributing to in this project. I helped in the concept and paper map phases. Ryan and I were inspired by Monkey Ball and how the players could continue their game experience, even in the credits sequence.
Ending Credits as an interactive level
Post Mortem
What Went Well ?
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A majority of the team was cooperative and participated in team scheduled work hours.
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Transitioning between leadership went smoothly. The members of the team accepted the change and worked well with the new lead structure.
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Documentation was something that the team became aware of and paid attention to.
What Went Wrong ?
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As some leaders had to step down, there was a lack of communication between them and other leaders about who would take their place, or to what capacity they could still fulfill their roles.
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LLC formation didn’t go as smoothly as planned due to several extenuating circumstances.
Steam Page formation wasn’t started soon enough, thus creating a situation where the team was working down to the wire to get all of the approval procedures done on time. -
Consistency in using Trello to track project progress. Not every member of the team updated their tasks appropriately on Trello to reflect the status of their work. This created confusion and made some of the pipelines slower than they should have been.
What I Learned ?
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Hold team members accountable for utilizing appropriate communication channels to convey important information. If massive changes happen, all people involved need to know.
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Take the time to research every aspect of company formation if it is needed for the team to publish their work.
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Give plenty of time to gather necessary materials for Steam publication as they have a five day waiting period for approving potential pages. They also have a thirty day waiting period between paying them the app fee and the potential release window that a team can have.
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Reinforce the use of project tracking software in a team. Knowing what everyone is doing will cut down on confusion and potential repeat work.
