Seasons of Rocco is a game for cosy gamers. You play as Rocco the raccoon collecting and planting seeds in spring, waiting to grow the fruit, collecting fruit in autumn, hybernating in winter and beginning the loop all over again.
During the minor Game Design and Development the assignment was to create a game in 13 weeks. The extra challenge was that teams consists of a complete game studio, ours contained 17 students. The team was divided into artists, developers and game designers, and one producer. The latter was my job!
Producer
Working on a project with a team of 17 students as a producer is not something many can tell. It was one of the most difficult thing I had to do during my study, but I really wanted the opportunity. Altough it was fun, managing a project of such a size left me changed.
Beginning with planning: most of the students wanted a task they hadn’t done before, which meant that the planning should give them double the time they expect to need. This was only the easy part of the project.
During the project some students started to get against me because I chose a different direction than they wanted. They didn’t accept that I took away their right of choice, but it didn’t occur to them that my decisions were for the benefit of the whole team. I tried several methods to have mannered talks, but they couldn’t change their mind and stopped doing anything.
Even though some students were difficult to work with, others were great! My way of hammering to communicate, making sure everyone has a task and weekly checks in about their progress helped them a lot.
Being a producer or leader doesn’t mean to order people to do stuff, it’s to let the people do their thing, while you as the leader are keeping the big picture and provide tools so everyone else can stay productive with what actually matters: making stuff.
