Minus-One Productions Dev Log #3 - Michael Poulos

Minus-One Productions Dev Log #3

Michael Poulos

22/11/2023

Up until this day since our last dev log, I've worked on and completed the following documents:

• The GDD
• The player persona profile
• The Proposal Presentation
• The Team Charter 
• The Creative Brief

I've also spent about nine hours organizing meetings as Minus-One's project manager. Within this timeframe, the most significant things I've learned are:

• Being a project manager is often highly taxing 
• To use Microsoft Word or other software to make a document look good
• It's best to create a convention for the style of one's documents
• Having a realistic pipeline and agenda for each team meeting is vital
• Taking breaks during meetings is crucial

I sought insights on being a project manager when speaking with our level design professor, Joseph, who was and still is a level design lead. He told me many things that are unattractive when it comes to being a PM, like not having much personal time and constantly having to know what the status of the project is, and one of the more scary things is that if a team is in crunch period, much of the blame will go to the project manager. During our last lecture, I also learned many other harsh realities of being a project manager. I am grateful to know these things because more than one industry professional has told me the best practices of a PM.

After spending hours attempting to make our GDD as visually appealing as possible in Google Docs, I realized that much of my time was wasted on failing to understand how the system worked. I'd try numerous orientations of images near text that would only sometimes work and, other times, cause me to reorient everything on the page. Colleagues of mine have told me that I'm better off using Microsoft Word, which is likely the best to use. 

When stylizing our GDD, I found it very helpful to list the font, colour, image, headers, footers, and spacing conventions that I came up with that would fit our game's aesthetic. This enabled me to be more efficient when working.

After spending all those hours preparing my meetings, I found it astronomically beneficial to write out everything we needed to do in each weekly meeting and then allot timeslots where our team would work in sprints or waterfall development. I also ensured that we were strict about following each meeting's agenda, which made us very focused and efficient. I also ensured we took about fifteen-minute breaks every hour to maximize productivity. 

While I've had my ups and downs as the Minus-One Productions project manager, I've taken many valuable lessons away already.