Kilonova

'Kilonova' is a project that has had over twenty individual contributors working on it for over a year. With a wide expanse of disciplines (i.e., programming, design, art, audio, and production), Sleepy Spirit has dedicated a lot of time and effort to making 'Kilonova' a portfolio piece worth boasting about.

This was the first project where I was able to be a full-time producer without additional content creation. With this freedom, I was able to implement a plethora of policies and tools that largely benefitted the team!

NOTABLE ACCOMPLISHMENTS

Task Forces

At the beginning of the project, Sleepy Spirit was experiencing extreme discipline siloing. To combat this, I implemented task forces.

Simply put, a task force is a group of people from different disciplines tasked with working on a specific aspect of the game (e.g., character). This encouraged cross-discipline interaction without creating a different kind of silo due to departments still having department meetings throughout the week.

To reinforce this concept, I rearranged the seating chart of the team space so that task force members sat next to each other. At first, the team was against the seat chart change. I convinced them to try it for a week, asking them to trust me. At the end of the week, when I brought up the topic, the entire team was vehemently against getting rid of the seating chart!

Not only was team morale boosted, but the project saw more productivity and a ~200% increase in content check-ins/implementations.

Retrospectives

After each milestone, I would schedule an hour where the entire team would gather to discuss the following questions:

• What went well with this milestone?

• What didn't go well with this milestone?

• What should be improved on for the next milestone?

Team members would come to these sessions with their answers pre-written and we would go around in a circle. At first, these sessions were relatively silent as the team hadn't yet built trust in each other. As time went on, these sessions became something the team looked forward to (e.g., "Oh that was good! I'm going to bring that up during retrospective"). Some of the most critical changes I implemented came from discussions during this time (i.e., production one-on-ones that anyone could schedule).

Though we had a lot of calls for improvement, the retrospectives also served as a place to give kudos to team members. Even if a member wasn't spotlighted, the entire team was visibly happier and ready to jump into the next milestone! These sessions allowed the team to take a step back and look at the project from a third-person view; an experience a lot of them commented was freeing.

Collaborative Planning

Members felt like they didn't get a say on when or how something needed to be completed. As a means to help with this, I created a planning sheet that each task force had to fill out at the beginning of each milestone. The planning sheet would have required tasks that were necessary for the class and a calendar view. From there, the task forces would meet with each other and begin discussing their next month plans, priority ordering on tasks, and setting up meetings with other task forces to go over items completed.

By giving the task forces the oppurtunity to plan the nuances of their schedules, the team actually collaborated more than ever! All required tasks were getting done quicker and opened time for the team to try new ideas without jeopardizing the project. Outside of an initial check with production to ensure there wasn't any conflicts, the task forces had full reign over their schedules.