What Went Well:

• Communication between the leads team and the stakeholders was well kept throughout the development process. When we knew we'd miss a milestone deliverable, I made sure to give the stakeholders enough of a head's up to manage expectations, buying time and good will for the team. 

• We cut elements mid-production with careful structure and a calculated communications plan . (see my Game Developer blog post on the subject here)

• There were a lot of ongoing elements toward the end of development and the project was potentially on course for a difficult landing. I worked with the other leads to create a key priorities plan and reallocated talent resources to ensure we closed the project at the quality we had initially intended. 

• We ran multiple Games User Research (GUR) tests simultaneously and were quick to filter raw observations and survey results into actionable feedback for the team. The designers were quick with the iterative process and ensured educated, user-tested decisions were implemented. 

• The leads team held regular check-ins to ensure high priority deliverables met shippable quality expectations. When an otherwise fun feature fell behind others, we ultimately removed it. Therefore, those closest to production quality were instead completed.

• While there were plenty of stressful moments in development, general team morale and project buy-in was largely kept high. I accomplished this through the performative elements woven into my team announcements and presentation craft (see following section).

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What Went Wrong:

• Especially in the earlier milestones, we had breaks in the communications pipeline where one lead or another would go directly to a team member of a different discipline rather than through the target discipline's lead or producer. This led to conflicting messaging and people being left in the dark. 

• The UI/HUD team was a team of two software developers and no artists for a significant portion of development. This resulted in a production scramble in the later milestones. Ultimately, some target UX goals had to be cut.

• The audio team did not regularly document third-party (non-developer created) assets. This resulted in the audio producer and I spending the final days scrambling to ensure all in-game assets were publishable. 

• Many of the technical requirements for Steam publication on PC were left out until the later milestones, resulting in late-development staffing rearrangement.

• Significant performance testing was delayed until Alpha. Ultimately the performance team got the game running on a wide array of systems, but at the expense of creating a more stressed environment. 

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Even Better If:

• We made better use of pre-production to flesh out the product backlog.

• We set discipline-to-discipline communications expectations in earlier in the process and enforced said pipeline. 

• We kept a universal document for third party assets from Day 0. 

• We prioritized the technical requirements and publisher feature requirements during the earlier milestones.