Mr. Bladder Has To Go

Mr. Bladder Has To Go!

Lead Producer

60 Developers | 12 Months | Unreal | Third-Person Balancing Game

Description:

Mr Bladder Has to Go is a whimsical balancing game where you play as Mr Bladder, a container-shaped guy in an organ-themed world, who is trying hard not to spill his pee in public. I have worked on this project as lead producer for about a year since preproduction, with an expected release on Steam in May 2027.

Responsibilities

Spearheaded central production documents, including a project roadmap, milestone timeline, macro schedule, and production bible to sync team communication and track project progress

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Bladder_Production Bible

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Maintained a strong communication pipeline through weekly team build reviews, standardized agendas, weekly announcements, and regular check-ins with teammates

Integrated a custom progress tracker using Google Sheets to facilitate task tracking, analyze team velocities, and monitor backlog items, keeping team leads informed on project progress

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Led recruitment efforts, handling over 100 candidates by developing a custom-made automatic candidate tracker in Google Sheets, minimizing manual review

Continuously adjusting and negotiating project scope with team leads and stakeholders while considering current progress and work cadence to maintain game quality and hit the release date

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Maintaining Healthy Scrum Practices through scheduled backlog refinement, retrospectives, and milestone post-mortems, leading to continuous process improvement

Introduced and maintained pod-style communication pipelines across departments, significantly streamlining work efficiency

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Creating a safe and happy work environment through regular team social events, developing a 'culture and commitment' document, and initiating an anonymous concern form

Key Learnings

Data over Feelings for Tough Decision-Making. Throughout the development period for this project, I tracked current progress compared to expected progress for each milestone. At the end of one milestone, I realized we were behind on promised deliverables and needed an honest conversation with leadership. Tracking how long it took to make one level from the previous milestone, I estimated we would need to cut a level to stay on track to release in May, which I relayed to leadership. Though the information was hard to take in, the leads eventually agreed with my assessment, leading to reduced pressure on teams such as the engineering and art departments.

Delegate, Delegate, Delegate!! This project has around 60 members on the team, with about half being enrolled in the capstone class and the other half volunteers. I knew I would need help managing a team this large and with differing schedules, so I recruited three associate producers to help: one focused on the art department, one for the engineering department, and one for the design department. This allowed me to focus on big-picture tasks like roadmap planning, adjusting project scope, and assisting the game director with communicating vision to the team.

Establish Clear, Written Expectations: During development, some of the members of the team would not complete tasks for a sprint or not communicate with their leads when they needed more time. To prevent this issue from significantly affecting development progress, I initiated the creation of a "Culture and Commitment" doc that states the team's communication expectations and outlines a clear protocol for requesting task extensions/breaks and consequences for not adhering to the protocol. This has led to better communication overall amongst members, as well as making it clear to leads how to escalate the situation if needed.