Fun With Production!

I’ve been having a lot of fun with production (and Trello!) lately, and brushing up on producer skills on this project. Really, I’m inspired by this talk by Adam Robinson-Yu, the developer of A Short Hike, who used a trello board and really held himself accountable to good production practices even while working solo. Honestly, it’s a fantastic talk for any small dev, and I show it to my own game design students every quarter as a good example of basically being functional and keeping deadlines while working by yourself or in a tiny team!

For my own purposes, I’m using Trello in a sort of simplified agile/scrum format: I have a few columns for resources on the left and right of the main “active” lists, and then columns for my backlog of tasks, my active tasks for a “sprint” (this is the least formal part, I'll be setting dates shortly, but keeping this as a kind of "all in-progress tasks" at the moment), and a list for completed tasks. I’m moving cards through the process as I go, task by task, and labeling everything according to discipline: scripting/programming, art/animation, sound, writing, design (mechanics/systems and level design here, primarily), production, and a few extra labels for things like documentation, promotion (like writing this little devlog!), tutorial resources, etc.

Honestly, this is as fun as the scripting and art/level creation stuff. Moving cards around is… wildly satisfying. Here’s what my own little board looks like right now!

I’ve been doing very similar things for a very long time as an Editor in Chief (and Managing Editor before that), managing teams and projects. But it feels good to apply that to a little creative project of my own design, and bizarrely fun to just kind of look at the lists on my phone if I’m out and about. Is that weird? It might be weird. But it feels like I’m making real progress!

Again, this is a teeny-tiny project. The finished game will probably take players about five minutes to get through, depending on a couple of things here (how many Visual Novel scenes I write, how many tiny puzzle levels, etc.). I’m really doing this to beef up a bunch of skills from my, uh, 2013-2014 tiny game dev heyday, where I made a few things and participated in little game jams a bit more regularly. I want to get much better at every aspect of this!