Producing with Kameron Misheikis

     Hello, my name is Kameron Misheikis and I am the Producer for Woebegone Woods! I am responsible for planning weekly sprints, scheduling milestones, and making sure that all of the work that goes into making Woebegone Woods lives up to the original vision we put in place as a team. 

     Throughout Woebegone Wood’s development, we had many obstacles to ultimately overcome. Last semester in particular was hard because of the massive narrative system that had to be implemented for our final demo to be finished. As someone who had just joined the team last spring, I had a hard time figuring out the best way to manage everyone in order for each person to be successful. This led to me putting the programming team in a situation where they were doing a lot of work in a short amount of time, and created a lot of fatigue and hurt their progress as a whole leading to cutting certain additional features. 

     The outcome of that semester was disappointing but it gave me a lot of learning points that I could use to grow as a producer and get our game back on track and in a state where the team felt more comfortable getting everything done on time. Using what I learned from the previous semester, I decided to strive to give my team a lot more manageable time frames to get things completed. I was able to achieve this mainly by using Gantt Charts and restructuring our team meetings during the week. I felt that a lot of time was wasted during many of the meetings during the past semester. I also learned from another producer that Gantt Charts were a useful tool that can help me stay organized and plan for important deadlines. These changes really helped me figure out what works best for each of the team members and put everybody in a place where they felt comfortable with the work they were doing. 

     The changes I made ended up being very helpful to the entire team as I was able to navigate our squad through a difficult situation where one of our team members was unable to do complete any tasks because of health complications.  Even with this setback, we still managed to succeed because of how well we utilized the Gantt Chart and team communication from all parties. Once we were notified of the situation, as a team, we were able to come up with a new plan that gave the ill team member necessary time off that also didn’t put the rest of the team in a situation where they felt too overwhelmed. This was a great learning experience for me as a producer and really helped me understand how to view things from multiple perspectives and the importance of overall game planning as it is something that doesn’t get noticed as often as it should.