Silent Slayer is a horror reverse escape room type of game. This means instead of trying to escape an area by going through various puzzles and traps, you overcome them to venture deeper into the castle. More details to be revealed as we get closer to our trailers and launch!
Take a look at the latest trailer!
Day to Day work
A large part of how I’ve been supporting this team is working through communication gaps between directors, leads and non lead folks on my team. When I was initially brought on, there seemed to be high level vision concerns from the team, and part of my main goal was to help ease any tension and be a conduit for information so that the team understood high level pivots that were coming.
Art Production/Audio Production
Part of my work on this project includes supporting the grander Art team as a whole while making sure they are aligned and in sync with the design features being worked on in our sprints.
I work with my Art Director to make sure all artists have direction, are unblocked and had sprint goals clearly outlined with direction if needed from other disciplines to ensure timely sprint goal completion. If estimates were running over or there were unforeseen issues coming up, I made sure the directors were made aware of these issues and how they might impact our high level schedule.
Part of my large feature support, from concept to final asset delivery including establishing pipelines with external vendors, combining that with our internal processing and updating to fit the needs of our game. There was an effort to get the Vampires through this pipeline that involved 13+ people, ranging from texture updates, rig updates, animation updates and signoffs in between. Though daunting, I worked with the team to establish the workflow step by step and stood up a tracker that we referenced in our daily syncs to ensure we were hitting our timelines for internal stakeholder signoffs.
I take great pride in offloading mental strain by putting everything in a central tracker to visually see where our work is progressing. Having a visual to bring up in our syncs just helps the communication flow easily and while there is a little overhead of keeping this up to date, I believe having a good tracker support Jira is a match made in heaven.
Guiding Feature Work
Part of my duties on this team is supporting Sprint Kick Offs with realistic goals for features. We do this by having a sprint sign off before the sprint starts the following week, with lead buy in and playtest callouts.
When turning over the sprint, we work through standing up the stories in Jira, with goals, leads, supporting staff and directors so the team has one central place for information. When we kick off the sprint, I work with my teams to have an implementation breakdown where we walk through dependencies and high level understandings of what work will be done and when so we can also call out any reviews that need to happen.
Smoketesting
Every week, I coordinate with directors and leads to understand updates and evaluate what can be tested in headset to help stabilize the build week to week. This involves me assessing what progress has been made, what upcoming playtests/VP plays, milestones we should be prepping for and working through an agenda with the team. Once the agenda for playtesting is solidified, I work through testing the build, identifying any bugs, logging them and giving a status report to my director group to see what must be addressed for upcoming important dates.
I do really love working through the game and playing, it gives me the chance to get super intimate with the game, progress the team is making and ask clarifying questions on things that aren’t hitting the mark.
With this information, I am able to give a status update on various parts of the game and speak to stakeholders on status on the fly. Which just instills confidence in the team, in myself and hopefully to our stakeholders!
Playtesting
I work with the playtest coordinator at the studio to work on identifying playtesting goals, design goals, A/B testing, duration playtesting to ensure we are getting user testing feedback on early stage features and pivoting where needed based off of data with our market audience. Smoketesting the build every week ensures we are able to have a stable build for playtesting efforts to help minimize lead time on timely playtests that need a quick turnaround.
Team Show and Tell
Team Show and Tells are meetings in which we work through our updates, every two weeks so that the team has awareness of what other team members are working through. This is usually used as a team bonding, morale booster to see all the great progress the rest of the team has worked on. This also helps form the sense of a team, with people getting to talk about how cool all these updates are and I feel this process just helps solidify the team dynamics. It breaths life into the team by forming more connections, having fun and cracking jokes together, building an actual sense of belonging to people. Its no surprise that people perform better when they feel that sense of ownership, sense of inclusion, sense of building something larger than themselves. Having these feel good moments with the team as a whole just reinforces that cohesion. Without a good team dynamic, there is no project so this type of meeting is super important to me and I take great care to create a warm, safe environment for everyone to shine in <3
VP Plays
Getting feedback from our VPs can be seen as a stressful ordeal but it doesn’t have to be! Part of my work for this team has been working through setting up agendas according to our high level schedule and getting VP feedback to make sure we are hitting the notes that the game needs to deliver on globally. After working through the meetings with the proper stakeholder, I get the notes to the team so that everyone can understand how we are tracking in our high level goals, boost up praise while working through feedback in tangible bites of information for directors to make pivot decisions on.
By keeping everyone on the loop of what is coming down the pipe, we are able to continuously foster open communication and trust amongst the team which will in turn hopefully allow faster turn around speed when we do need to pivot since direction changes won’t be as jarring.
It brings me great joy to compartmentalize the feedback into actionable bits that will go through our established feedback process pipeline and then also bring all praise to the team members directly. Everyone likes to feel like they are doing a good job and reinforcing the good feels directly to team mates solidifies trust, team bonding and a sense of hitting our intended vision! All great things to continue to foster on a team rapidly working through our features and schedule!
While this title is still in development, I hope to share more details and hopefully add more pictures of fun moments I had with the team 🙂
If there are any questions, please feel free to email me!
