Post #3 

Throughout our series of blog posts, you’ll be reading about what each member of our team has been creating to put in to SPY2K. However, since we started in September, I haven’t made a single thing that’s actually been put in the game.

How is that possible? What have I been working on all this time?

I’m the Producer and my job is looking after the overall project schedule. I plan out what needs to be done and how long it will take to be completed to make sure that we all meet our deadlines. Wondering when Level Up is? I’ve started the countdown on our whiteboard for everyone to know.

Aside from creating the production plan, the biggest part of being Producer is making sure that communication never stops between all team members. This usually means that I’m constantly walking up and down the hallway talking to everyone on our team. Whether I’m checking in on their progress, updating people on major changes, or trying to solve problems, you’ll rarely find me sitting at my desk.

For example, let’s say the Design team has created a new mission for SPY2K. In order for the mission to actually be placed in the game, I need to make sure that the Art team knows so they can figure out how everything will look, the Sound team needs to know what kind of sound effects they’ll need, and the Tech team needs to know so that they can actually program everything to work properly. If any team was unaware that something was added, it would set the entire project back.

The biggest hurdle that we overcame was during our winter break, when our group was off for a month, but we still had to get a lot of work done. In order to keep our communication over the break, we had scheduled weekly meetings on Discord where we could talk about our progress, and I was constantly sending out reminders and messages to everyone. While I may have gone a little overboard on the number of messages I was sending out, we managed to get a lot of work done and everyone knew what was going on at all times. It was after that month that I learned that there’s no such thing as too much communication.

Ultimately, being Producer means that you need to know what is going on at all times, and that can be really stressful. However, our team is full of people who are motivated to create the best game we possibly can and who genuinely enjoy the work they’re doing. Because of this, I have the utmost confidence that we will continue to meet every deadline, and that makes me want to work harder to help them as much as possible.