Dreamwillow - Nico Williams' Portfolio

Dreamwillow

Developed by WolverineSoft Studio

Production Director

About Dreamwillow

Dreamwillow is a top-down 2D twin-stick shooter made by the University of Michigan's video game development club, where you resurrect your felled foes to fight alongside you in a dreamlike forest.

Development Info

11 Week Development Cycle
32 Developers
Unity Engine

My Responsibilities

Handled detailed task and bug tracking across all departments to assess progress towards milestones
Created high level development schedule to communicate milestones to studio members and leadership
Coordinated with level design and combat teams to align workflows for designing enemy encounters
Communicated with art and programming directors to address dependencies within the character pipeline
Prioritized and maintained product & sprint backlogs in Jira to streamline sprint planning and execution

Postmortem

What went wrong

Didn't have as much time to polish & iterate on gameplay design
Audio team felt their work was too reactive
Creative direction wasn't always completely clear

What went right

Team members felt involved and had a lot of creative control
Set up an effective pipeline for quality assurance
Final deadline was met with little work being done at the last minute

Lessons learned

Important to integrate audio (sfx particularly) into the workflow earlier on
When possible, try to give team members creative control within their tasks
Long-term schedules go a long way to keep everyone on the same page

Nicolas Williams

Game Producer