It was Johannes, the same guy who did the current website for Frozenbyte, which was built on a pre-existing backend and only required fairly basic database coding. As I mentioned, we only had one developer working on the site for the majority of the development. This Seal campaign required a completely new back end and front end from our previous seal promotions, with a focus on scalability and re-usability for potential future Seal campaigns. The initial sketch of the site on the left and the final version on the right. This could’ve been avoided if we had thought out our art assets needs better and more thoroughly earlier in development. which led to her and our developer having to needlessly redo the art assets (putting everything on separate layers, filling in every layer so there wasn’t any empty holes behind any of the layers etc.). We hadn’t taken into account issues regarding using the art assets in our trailer and needing to have everything on separate layers etc. She made initial sketches that we were happy with but as development progressed and the project’s aesthetic direction changed, we realized that our initial specifications no longer applied. The same inexperience also led to a situation where we didn’t specify our art asset requests well enough for Mio. Luckily, we were in a position where we could push our deadlines back, and the developers we worked with were very understanding and patient with our delays. Inexperience on my part as a producer and inexperience on the part of Johannes, both with scrum and working on such a database-heavy project, which combined resulted in time estimations being grossly under shot, and at some points being impossible to make. Also, our developer had never used scrum before and grew disillusioned with the system out of frustration and lack of experience, especially since he was really the only one involved in the scrum project management, in addition to me. I should’ve been more adamant and kept to the routine in order to have prevented this from happening.
Not focusing on project management was, of course, a mistake, and the responsibility was mine. This caused development to be frantic and disjointed by the end of the project. Later on in development we started slipping from our project management, as development and getting everything set for launch were keeping us busy, and we didn’t put our energy into focusing on it. After each sprint we would have a sprint review and a retrospective meeting. We used Scrum to plan two week sprints in which we set out stories and planned time estimates for them.
Our project management at first was working quite well. We eventually had to shorten the campaign by a week because the end date for the coupons was already set so that it wouldn’t clash with Steam’s Autumn Sale, and that we could finish up everything before launch. We would have the initial deadline set for early Autumn and then it would get pushed a back a few weeks, then another few weeks, and another and another etc. These milestones changed over time and our deadlines got pushed back multiple times. During the development, we set milestones for ourselves and a deadline when the campaign should kick off. We started the development of Huge Seal in late June with the team consisting of me as the producer, Johannes as the web developer and Mio as the artist. Project Management and Communication Issues In this blog post I’m going to discuss (in the style of a Gamasutra post mortem article) what went wrong, what went right and what the feeling over here at Frozenbyte is now that the campaign is over. The campaign itself was a great experience and a success for us but the process of it coming together was a challenge and took a lot of work. The aim of Huge Seal was to bring great indie games together for people to obtain at discounted prices. During the Huge Seal, users could pick 5 Steam coupons from a list of 35 games, and for every 3 games purchased, they got one random Steam key, from the list of games, for free. Last month we concluded Huge Seal, a Steam discount coupon giveaway featuring over 30 indie games that ran from November 18th until November 25th.
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