Brain Powered Games Africa is a growing collection of digital games focusing on exercising one or more cognitive abilities, including attention, memory, language, visual/spatial functions, and executive functions.The games serve as is computerized cognitive rehabilitation therapy (CCRT) with HIV inflected children in Malawi and Uganda and is currently in a clinical research trial to gauge effectiveness.

Producer || April 2024-September 2024 || 6 Months || Team Size: 6 || GEL LAB

Producer

Oversaw the development and production of design, programming, art, and audio for the duration of the project.
Meet with clients to ensure expectations were met and delivered in a timely fashion.
Managed and Organized a Jira board to keep track of tasks and bugs over the project's development time.
Ran daily stand ups and met with the director of the company to guarantee the project was on track.
Operated QA play tests and created avenues for bugs to be reported and distributed to programmers in a timely fashion.

Kick-off

For this project we had two programmers, two artists, one designer, and one producer. We were given 6 months to bring our game onto the most recent version of our game engine and fix any bugs that comes with that. We were also tasked with porting our game onto tablets with very low specs. We spent the first few weeks familiarizing ourselves with documentation and the project's code base. I set up a Jira board and translated all the major tasks into sprints. This created a manageable timeline for the duration of the project. We also met everyday at noon for a daily stand-up and to keep everyone on the same page. We would also play the game at this time and report and major bugs that needed the entire teams attention.

Onboarding

BPG was running since April of 2019. My team was the 5th team to work on the project and each team before us had a different way of organizing information. This made it very difficult to familiarize ourselves with the project. I tasked the team to play the game for a week to make sure they understood the mechanics and how the game should operate. This helped in building a strong base for the developers to work on for the remainder of the project. I also tasked one of our members to organize all the documentation and create new documentation to fill in the blanks on any mechanic that was not fully described.

Production

After familiarizing ourselves with the game I set up a meeting with our client to cement our goals for the projects development. I also met with every developer on the team and asked each of them what questions they had. I consolidated the list and prepared a presentation for the client. After meeting with them, we were given three tasks. Get rid of bugs, port the game onto 2020 Samsung tablets, and create a clone of the game that is reskinned to fit a Peruvian theme.

Optimization

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One of our main objectives was to port the game onto older software. This software had low memory space and processing power. This made us take a step back and look at all the places in the project where we could optimize the performance. The first step I took was approving of the team upgrading the project to a more recent version of Unity. This created some bugs, but helped in the long run as the team was more familiar with the version we chose. I also tasked the artists to look into all the assets that could be compressed and make them more manageable. The final step we took was using the Unity profiler to look at any major points in the project where performance was low. Eventually we refactored some systems, optimized the graphics, and I was able to download the game onto the older software for our clients.

Peruvian Reskin

One of our other main objectives came when we needed to reskin our game to be Peruvian. This meant changing all the backgrounds, buildings, animals, instructions, and UI. My first step was to list out all the assets that needed to be redone. Thankfully the newly updated documentation helped immensely in this process. I ranked all the tasks by importance and met with the artists to make sure the workload was realistic. After creating a manageable timeline the artists started recreating all the art in the game. We were able to finish the art ahead of schedule and the rest of the time was spent on polishing and optimizing even further.

Bug Fixes

The final objective was fixing any bugs we encountered. Over the course of the project we found hundreds of bugs. I created a solid pipeline of getting the bugs reported, having a way of replicating the bug and a video showing it, having all this information on a Jira task and assigned to someone, and an estimated time it would take for it to be finished. This system worked out tremendously in getting bugs solved. I was also able to rank them by importance to make sure we were prioritizing the right bugs.

Reflections

Learned how to allocate resources with limited development power and still meet clients expectations.
Developed the skills necessary to keep the project on track through unforeseen setbacks caused from porting the project onto multiple different and updating the project version.
Discovered an efficient way for bugs reported in playtests to become tasks and distributed to the programming team.
Setting up clear expectations from the clients end and the developers end is critical for keeping the team's morale high and expectations clear.