Harbinger of Spring
Roles: Producer Lead Programmer Designer
Harbinger of Spring is the culmination of my senior year of work and my SCAD career of networking. This team was personally recruited by me over a two year period and as the producer I was responsible for the product in its entirety. As the sole Programmer, I spent my summer outside of class creating all the networking logic for this multiplayer game. During the class I coded the entire game in UE4 Blueprint and at times C++. As a designer I gave input on the balance and flow of play. There are detailed blogs at the bottom for each of my roles.
Project Objective
Harbinger of Spring is a BFA capstone project that was created over many months with over twenty people working together to bring it to completion. An original team of nine people, iX Games Studio, took the project from concept to beta. Our objective was to meet the requirements of the class to receive our degree as well as create a Market Comparable.
Current State
The objectives of the capstone class and expectations of our client, who is our professor, have already been met. Harbinger of Spring is still ongoing, but we have a fully functioning Beta that has all features listed in the original scope of the class.
However, iX has other objectives we are striving to meet. We have often referred to Harbinger of Spring as being Market Comparable. We did not want to develop a game for college competitions and instead focused on creating a game that met our goal of being Market Comparable. To reach that goal additional polish after the competition of the course is still on going, despite challenges that COVID-19 has presented. Our latest trailer can be viewed here:
Key Contribution
My role as producer and programmer both were equally important to the completion and success of Harbinger of Spring. As the sole programmer my work on creating the network code, solving replication issues in UE4, and creating the entire framework of the game was my key contribution. The tech blog contains details and photos of my work that can be viewed to get a more in depth look at my process.
As the producer I recruited all the members of iX that worked on Harbinger of Spring. Overseeing the original team of nine people was an undertaking that paved the way for the team to grow to over 20, a necessary size to complete such a large product in such a short window. Creating a strong organizational structure and culture, setting up meetings for content review, and keeping our tools and software up to date were all major contributors to our ability to expand the team and complete the project. I was responsible to my professor, our client, for all deliverables on HoS. This included the delivery of the .exe, tracking weekly burn downs of our sprints, and creating the production plan including vision and backlog.