Production Lead / Studio Manager
Feb 2021 - Nov 2021
Games shipped
(whilst I was Production Lead at PolyFruit Studios)
Casual / Hypercasual:
Swing Hero
Dust Rush
Where am I?
Hop Shot
Live Service
Kingdom Jump
Prototypes
Something I personally organized was agreements multiple mobile publishers that we could make prototypes for in exchange for a small kick back. I facilitated both an internal pipeline for game ideas, with a simple 1 page design doc template that generated tens of ideas per week, as well as taking docs from publishers and allowing one of our teams to make the prototype for them. Our turnaround time for a hypercasual prototype was usually around 2-3 weeks and at our peak we had more than 10 teams working on them. Games that succeeded made it to the app store and google play store.
Asset Store Items
Because of the volume of artists we had, we decided that asset store project would also be a good avenue for steady revenue. We shipped multiple sets, including a viking and space themed packs.
Responsibilities:
People and Project Management across multiple teams (with up to 150 staff members)
Production pipeline
Hiring
Agile Training (SCRUM & KANBAN)
Risk Assessment
Communicating with stakeholders, publishers and teams
Building trust and relationships with fantastic people
Delegating work and outlining production plans
Identifying bottlenecks in production and improving the production pipeline
Arranging team building activities
Delivering multiple final products and many prototypes for major publishers
Economy Designer
May 2020 - Feb 2021
When I joined Poly Fruit (formerly Pineapple Studios) my role was to outline both the in-game economy and monetisation strategy around the game.
I developed a functional economy sheet with a built in tool that allows designers to fill a level with the correct amount of potential score for the player for an optimal distribution of xp, currency and difficulty. Beyond this there is a battlepass model that would support the free tier of the game, as well as a cosmetics store outline. There’s also a page of function tests if you’re interested in the logic used in the sheet.
Once this was functional I began discussing the structure of the team and offered to implement an AGILE workflow, I also maintained the economy sheets whilst in a more production focused role from here on.
Background story:
This was during covid as my Masters Degree had just been suspended. I was reached out to by the owner of Polyfruit and this was initially not a paid role, this was a profit-share project as something to do while I found employment. This would become a paid role once I moved into a production role, as I was actively helping secure funding for the team and studio, however this required a pivot on how the team functioned. The full story from here goes from a rag-tag group of devs to a team of around 150. Drop me a message if you’d love to know more!