Zach Armentrout - Production Process

Showing how you 'produce' something is hard. It's a complex role with lots of moving parts. There's project managment; keeping schedules, making sure teams have the resources they need, defining actionable items. There's the specific knowledge that comes with being a part of a development team, knowing how art workflows function, understanding the constraints developers are working with.

In this section, I try to boil all that down to a few demonstrations. Ultimately, the role of a producer is varied depending on the team, the project, and the company, but I think there are a few things that can work across all of those.

All examples presented are from Hammerblow Studios, the small studio I've been putting together with friends.

When I start a new project, I like to create a vision board to see where everybody is at.

This is a sample of a very early project vision board I've been working on for a game my friends and I are making. I find vision boards help to set the general tone for the game and help with brainstorming ideas.

Shoutout to Whiteboards for J ira, that's the tool we use for vision boards and other miscellaneous planning.

This is a picture of part of the overall Project Planning board. This tracks all of the projects and ideas we have, and what stage they're in.

This is where every new idea goes. Each idea gets categorized into an Epic, and gets a description as well as a folder in our Office365 workspace to hold any artifacts we generate.

This is an example of one of our projects. We work in a psudo-Agile way where we break our project into Epics, Stories, and Sprints. Our sprints are usually around a month. We track the stories in each sprint, and we also add more to the backlog as we run into new issues. All stories are also categorized into Epics. We assign someone to each story and check in with them through the month to make sure things are progressing.

Artifact Managment is something that a lot of teams struggle with, ours is no exception. We've found what works best is a combination of OneNote (mostly used by me for note taking, jotting down ideas, and more), and Office365s OneDrive.

Each project gets a folder that we start populating as we go, trying to sort things into reasonable categories to make sure the things we create can be found again. We also link the work we do to the stories that generate them.

Twitter

GitHub

YouTube

Page updated

Google Sites

Report abuse