Producing a team of 11 - Jamie Marland

Overview

As producer I ran the SCRUMs, planned the schedule, kept the Trello up to date and turned the feedback from each session into tasks. I also kept the project organised in Perforce and in the engine, and made every build of the game.

Creative decisions were always made as a team, but they needed thinking through, and that was a big part of my job. So was sorting out technical problems and keeping everyone coordinated.

Planning around an MVP

We planned the project around a minimum viable product, getting something playable as early as possible and then iterating on it, with feedback driving the decisions (Rouse, 2020). The most important art and gameplay came first and everything else was built up in layers. For me, that meant a gameplay MVP and the first artist tools, then optimisation and VFX, then a final round of gameplay polish.

The early gameplay work ran on a grey blockout of the city, and I wrote the art bible’s Blockout slide.

An art bible slide titled Blockout. The text says a blockout of Lectra City and the sewer, intentionally closed circuit and designed to reuse assets as much as possible. It shows a grey top down view of the blockout with the looping track and the highway, and two grey perspective views under a blue sky with the curving overpass and a cooling tower.

The schedule

The production timeline was a Trello board (Duffy and Vatu, 2024) with a column for each week. Every card was tagged by discipline and had a priority and a status, and the deadlines were on it as deliverables.

The Production Timeline Trello board, one column per week from 17/2/25 Pre-prod to 19/5/25 Submission, each card tagged with its discipline, a priority and a status, with the two break weeks in April coloured purple

When I planned the project’s scope at the start, I built in buffer time (Doknic, 2024), and it paid off. It gave us room when problems came up, and meant anyone who needed a break could take one.

Towards the end the Trello got crowded, so for the final two-week sprint we switched to one big to-do list on screen for everyone, showing what needed doing and by whom. It suited the pace at the end, when several assets were being finished each day.

Hero:
Joe - Start Lights - Texture
Joe - Bang Sign - Texture
Vid - Powerplant - Model & Texture

Vehicle VFX:
Jamie - Exhaust - Effect
Jamie - Tire dust - Effect
Jamie - Tire marks - Effect

SCRUM and feedback

Every Tuesday I ran a SCRUM to go over what had been done and what was next. Most problems left the meeting with a plan of action, and every member had a say in the decisions.

After each playtest and the industry feedback session, I compiled the feedback and worked it into the following weeks alongside what was already planned. Vehicle physics, the track borders and the layout were all brought forward or added as tasks this way. The biggest example was the driving, which is covered on the gameplay page.

Roles and cuts

Shah and I made the asset list, and its categories decided the first roles. One rule I wrote into them was that as few people as possible should import finished assets into the project, to keep things consistent, and I was one of those people.

The roles were never meant to be fixed, which turned out for the best, since people ended up working across all sorts of tasks.

As the project went on, we decided together in the SCRUMs what to cut and how to share out the remaining work, and a few extension tasks didn’t make it into the final game.

Keeping it organised

I kept the folders, outliner and levels organised the whole way through, and held everyone’s files to the naming conventions in our style guide. The project lived in Perforce, and I kept the depot tidy as well.

The Unreal editor with Lectra City seen from above, the content browser showing the Borderlands folder split into _Global, _Meta, Art, Cinematic, Gameplay, Level, MaterialLibrary and UI, and the outliner grouped into 1_Meta, 2_Gameplay, 3_Lighting and 4_Art, with nine development cameras from 0_TopDown to 8_Finish under Dev — The content browser and outliner structure.

The level is split into sub-levels, with the art ones (ground, props and structures) kept separate from technical ones like audio, gameplay and lighting.

Lectra City from above with level colouration on: buildings and the highway in cyan, the distant skyline and cooling towers in magenta, the road in dark blue, and props scattered in purple and green — Level colouration on, one colour per sub-level.

Tracking progress

Development screenshots were one of our deliverables, so I set up nine fixed cameras around the track and captured them by hand from the blockout to the end. Because the cameras never move, any two dates line up exactly.

The start straight in the grey blockout on 12 March: plain boxes and cylinders under the highway overpass, with a blue sky — One fixed camera, blockout to finish.

The same view on 9 April, the overpass, cooling tower and buildings modelled and textured under a yellow sky, with the racers lined up on the start grid — One fixed camera, blockout to finish.

The top-down camera, from March to May.

At the end, the captures were cut together into a development breakdown.

Reflections

Our planning was one of the highlights of the project, and it meant we didn’t have to scrap much of what we set out to do. The buffer time was worth it too, since it absorbed the delays that came up without overloading anyone.

The one thing I’d change is my own workload. On top of producing, I took on four other roles to carry the weight of the project, and it led to a small amount of burnout. It worked out over 14 weeks, but it wouldn’t be sustainable on a longer project or in industry.

I’m proud of the team, and of being its producer. The next team I produced was Project UMBRAE.

Sources

Doknic, A. (2024). What Is Buffer Time & How to Find Your Sweet Spot | Memtime. [online] Memtime. Available at: https://www.memtime.com/blog/buffer-time.
The buffer time I built into the schedule.
Duffy, J. and Vatu, G. (2024). Trello Review. [online] PCMAG. Available at: https://www.pcmag.com/reviews/trello.
Trello, the tool the production timeline was run in.
Rouse, M. (2020). What Is a Minimum Viable Product (MVP)? - Definition from Techopedia. [online] Techopedia.com. Available at: https://www.techopedia.com/definition/27809/minimum-viable-product-mvp.
The MVP approach we planned the project around.