The Lobby (2023)

Project management

The Lobby was initially created as part of a 4-week college-level game design program at Digipen Institute of Technology, where I worked with a 7-person team of game artists, designers, and programmers to prototype this narrative platformer. Because we were given no strict team structure, a massive part of the project was establishing the organization and planning necessary to complete a playable build within just a few weeks. As the team member with the most experience, I quickly stepped up as the de facto director, helping assign one team member to SFX, another to level design, and working with the art team to create a cohesive art direction. In addition to these responsibilities, I took a lead engineering role, writing almost every line of code and collaborating with my team members to implement their content into the build.

At the end of the program, our game was acknowledged as the most complete out of 10 different games, and our professors offered us a unique opportunity to support the continued development of the game and work toward an eventual Steam release. I continued to lead the team through almost six months of development, balancing the outside responsibilities of my team members with the features we needed to set an efficient and sustainable schedule. However, as my team members became increasingly busy, I had to take on more and more of the project, from level design to narrative design to the music and audio. As disappointing as this was in the moment, it was a valuable opportunity to practice dealing with the complexity of a producer role and build my skill with communicating expectations.