Natural Disaster: A Butterfly’s Guide to Mass Destruction

Natural Disaster – A Butterfly’s Guide to Mass Destruction was my capstone game for my bachelor’s degree in games at the University of Utah. I was a producer on the project and oversaw the business side of getting the project published on steam. This project took around 8 months to complete or roughly two semesters. During this time, I learned a lot about production techniques and skills that are needed to work on a 30 person team.

Almost immediately the first thing I learned was how important proper communication between teams truly is. It took us some time but as we got into the project it became apparent that our asset pipeline was not working. This happened several times throughout the project where the producers had to sit down together and talk about how we could improve the pipeline. Because of this the leads would often be butting heads with one another meaning it was  up to us to find a solution that worked for all teams. This gave me a lot of good experience with conflict resolution which has helped me become quicker with finding solutions.

When I started as a Producer, I was assigned to look over the Engineers during my time on the project. As the Engineering producer I was ready to start helping keep track of assignments. When I joined the project a lot of the engineering team had already been working on a prototype for several months. So, I joined a group of people who were already an established team. It took me a bit to adjust to working with them. Even through the time I worked on the project I didn’t really get fully into the producer role as the Engineering lead was already well suited in it. This is partially my fault for not taking more of the initiative when we started, yet during the few times we tried to transition I felt I was often stopped from doing so by them.

Another big hurdle I had to get through was finding stuff to do as a producer. For most of my other projects before this I had worked in several positions in the project making both art and producing. In this project I was told to not really do much other than being a producer. With that being the case, it felt like I wasn’t doing as much as I could, which led to me feeling like I wasn’t doing enough with the project. As we neared the end, I was given the task to help with the machinima team putting in animations for our sequences, which is a large part of our game. Doing that dispelled any of those feelings I had and gave me a big boost in confidence.

Of course, working on the business aspect of things helped as well. It really allowed me to do things on my own, and gave me the opportunity to see what I could do. It also showed me how much easier things are when you work in a team. When it came to getting everything together to create a Steamworks account, or figuring out the problems in uploading the project to that account I was never to far away from being able to reach out to someone if I had questions.

Overall, I’d say the main three takeaways from my time on Natural Disaster were:

1. Doing proper standups is important for communication between departments,
2. Don’t let things build up and boil over, try to resolve issues when they are presented.
3. Teamwork and communication can really help when building new skills, or when confused. So don’t be afraid to ask a teammate.