Background

About Me

Being a student of the bachelor's degree in Video Game Development and Design at CITM UPC has opened a lot of doors for me in this industry, from obtaining extensive programming skills to gaining knowledge on how to design and produce artistically a good video game. In addition to that, due to the great amount of projects we do every year for the career, we had the opportunity to learn what it is to work as a team of two or three students, to a team of 25 students.

It took me a while to find what path in my career to pursue, since I never imagined myself working in a company as a 3D modeller or a level designer, to put some examples. Time passed by as well as subjects we did in the course, and I still didn't find what I was passionate about. That's where Project III came in.

I consider myself a person who loves organization and planification, as well as leadership and team communication. When I found out there was a role in the subject where someone had to be in charge for the project management, I dived right into the opportunity. I am extremely grateful for this experience as it proved to me that there was actually a role for me inside this industry.

Planning is bringing the future into the present.

• Mike Vance

Soft Skills

• Public speaking
• Leadership
• Project management
• Problem-solving
• Empathy
• Organization

Hard Skills

Besides the basic tools we learn in university for programming (like Unity, Unreal Engine, or languages like C++ and C#), or for art (3ds Max, Maya, or Photoshop), I had the chance to learn tools that were useful for the profile of a Producer.

• Jira
• Confluence
• HacknPlan
• Figma
• Excel
• Powerpoint

Experience

Unity Developer

Petoons Studio

University internship as a Unity game developer for Petoons Studio.

Public Speaking Internship

CITM UPC

University internship contributing to the CITM Open Days, by presenting my degree and my experience as a student to possible future CITM students.

Public Relations Lead

ESTIEM LG Barcelona

Member in charge of giving the university association visibility and encouraging growth in Barcelona.

Contribution

Project Overview

For the project, I had the role of Producer. My job was to implement the use of an agile methodology into the project, making important decisions as well as ensuring that all requirements for the game are met.

Main Tasks

Production Plan

I was mainly in charge of making sure the team understood and used the scrum framework in order to make our project. A production plan was made where all of the information on how we were going to work on our project was stated. I also made a presentation to the class about what it means to follow the scrum framework and what steps we had to take to make it effective and useful for us.

All of the different points I had to cover in the production plan about the scrum framework were the following:

• Sprints
• Milestones
• Backlog
• Scrum Teams
• Tools (HacknPlan, Drive and Github Issues)
• Risks

You can head to the Production tab in order to see in full detail the agile methodology implementation.

Problem Solving & Decision Making

With a big project ahead and a big team, problems were expected to come. We had some issues within the team, as well as tension, due to lack of time and a huge amount of stress. My job was to relieve this tension and try to make the project move forward no matter how many obstacles crossed our paths.

This consisted in ensuring a good communication between the parties envolved, as well as an empathetic mindset when working with people. At the end of the day, our mission was to make a product that we all were proud of, and it was our duty to work as a team in order to achieve it. My role as a producer was to keep the team unified until the very end.

In addition, decision making became more and more important when we were reaching the end of the project. Many decisions had to be made due to the lack of time, so, with help of the leads, we needed to prioritize and redirect the project into a game that had something to offer.

Generally, I tried to let the leads take the decisions for their teams, nevertheless, I had to intervene in certain occasions for the sake of the project, since it was my task to keep the general vision of the game and make those decisions taking into account the state of our project.

Centralizing Communication

As a producer, one of my main tasks was to serve as a mediator between our university, specifically with our investors (teachers), the lead of each department, and all of the members of the team. This meant filtering as well as planning and organizing requirements for the project, evaluation for the members, and solving any conflicts or issues.

In order to fufill this task, different types of meetings were held constantly, such as daily meetings between departments, daily leads meetings, weekly meetings with the investors, and weekly meetings with the leads.

Secondary Tasks

Marketing

I also took the role as the marketing figure of the project, by creating an Instagram account where we would give insights of who Chamfer Studios is as well what is the game we have developed.

Evaluation

At the end of every sprint, I did, with the help of the leads, a report on how each member was working for that week. This including an attendance to class, as well as to their daily meetings, an hour log, the list of tasks they worked on, the grade the leads would give them, as well as additional comments from the leads on how they were working.

This information was very useful for our investors to have an insight on how each member is collaborating in the project, which they had in mind when grading them.

Projects

In this section you will be able to find some projects I worked on in the past few years in university.

Miu's Dreams

Miu's Dreams is a short movie about my cat daydreaming. It is a project I created for Audiovisual Narrative class in CITM (UPC). In this class I had the opportunity to learn how to use Adobe Premiere Pro as well as making a short audiovisual narrative.

UnderEvil

UnderEvil is an RPG game created by FM Studios, a group of 7 students for our university subject called Project II (CITM UPC). In this class we had the chance to make our own engine and make a 2D RPG playable game for PC.

Cat Escape

Cat Escape is a 3D interactive map created with Unreal Engine by Paula Hitz, María Calle and Irene Hernández for our university subject 3D Environments. In this class we developed different skills such as 3D modelling and programming with Unreal Engine.