Deadly Gaze

Production Cycle: 4 months (2 months pre-production, 2 months full production)

My Role: Producer/Artist

My Contribution:

• Team Management (Fascilitating Meetings, prioritizing and then assigning tasks to team members, ensuring the team will meet deadlines)
• Production Documentation (production schedule, delta reports)
• Environment Art (Level Backdrops)
• Enemies (created 3 enemies, the trash can bot, the snowman bot, and the round hover bot)

Pre-Production team structure: 4 team members

• Producer/Artist
• Lead Designer
• Designer/Programmer
• Lead Artist

Full-Production team structure: 6 team members

• Producer/Artst
• Design Lead
• Art Lead
• Programmer/Artist
• Designer/Programmer
• QA Lead
  

Game Synopsis:

Deadly Gaze is a top-down maze game where you play as agent Jon Spinney, a detective who is trying to track down a cereal killer who is building killer robots. There are 3 levels and in each your goal is to find the exit of the level while avoiding the gaze of the robots who patrol the maze. Beating levels unlocks cut scenes which reveal more of the story.

My Take:

Deadly gaze was my first stab at game production, and I took a lot away from it. My primary roles in the team were as both producer and artist. I created the level backdrops as well as 3 of the robots in the game .Although I wouldn't consider this a good example of my artistic abilities this project taught me a lot about the process of making games, teamwork, and the all-important idea of scope.

As producer it was my job to look after the state of the project as a whole and ensure that everyone was on track and the project would finish by our deadline. Of course, I didn't really learn that until the end of pre-production when our team was in rough shape and I knew I needed to step up and take a more active role as producer. When we finished pre-production our team quickly realized that we had planned out a game that would be impossible to finish by the deadline, realizing this we simplified and stripped down our design to the two core mechanics of maze exploration and avoiding robots. This allowed us to focus in and finish the game on time and produce a much more complete game then we would have been capable of otherwise.

Deadly Gaze taught me a lot about the process of making games and the importance of everyone filling their individual roles and working together toward a finished product. I think my role as producer gave me valuable leadership experience that I have taken with me to my more recent roles as lead artist on both Planck and Re_Ball.

Credits:

Producer/Artist: Justin Kimball

Lead Design: Jaime Fraina

Programming: Scot Gaylord

Programming/Art: Dan Hart

Lead Artist/Sound: Chris Matuszek

Q/A Lead: Matt Gustafson

Music: Roxxi Minor