Soliris

My personal Story of Success:

My greatest success was during our last semester at the School for Games in Berlin, when I joined the team of 17 students for Soliris as a game designer.

We had a total of 10 weeks to finish the project, from our first briefing to the official publishing.

In the third week we were about to transition from pre-production to production when both our appointed producers fell ill. Since I was the one person with the most experience in that role at that time, I took over their responsibilities. 

I wrote and managed the entire project backlog, set up the taskboard on trello, organized and moderated team meetings and planned the overall schedule using agile methods – all while keeping an eye on the scope and waching out for feature creep. One additional challenge was that we had to design a game around the team composition. Without a single animator certain features simply were not an option while on the other hand three 2D artists needed to be kept busy and happy. I still had my tasks as a game designer and the fact that I was working on the project files directly in the engine allowed me insights into the development a pure producer wouldn’t have. 

The next weeks looked something like this: 

• On Monday I hosted the sprint meeting after which I updated the backlog and game design documents. 

• On Tuesday I discussed changes to the interface with the UI artist. 

• On Wednesday I analyzed input data from the eye tracker using the mathmatical methods I learned at the university to assist our programmers refining their algorithms. 

• On Thursday I wrote and implemented the tutorial in Unity and committed my updates using Mercurial version control. 

• On Friday I tweaked some balancing parameters before it was time to get the crew together for the weekly review and retrospective. 

Soon I became the person knowing the most about the current state of the project and my role naturally evolved into that of vision keeper. 

In short, I had a great time.

Soliris was later praised by teachers and seasoned members of the games industry as one of the best student projects they had ever seen. While a lot of that success was often attributed to my leadership, it was far from the only factor. We had several highly invested people who quickly became the unofficial heads of their respective department. And let's not forget Silvan with his funny memes who kept morale high even under pressure. Last but not least both planning and motivation can only ever assist a team performing at its best. Without a competent team, there is nothing to assist. So my respect goes to all the members of Team Kantik who did their part to make Soliris a success.