Designing and Producing

Through my DigiPen career I have been a designer and producer and three separate projects. Each time I didn't really have too much of a challenge balancing both. However, with Escape Velocity, which I worked on this summer during my internship for Strike Arena, it was my first time doing production and design professionally. I ended up learning a lot about how I compensated for the additional workload of design and production in student projects by going and doing extra Hours beyond the amount required and recommended for a course. Then as a paid position I could no longer go above the hours in a week.

Something I internalized and done on all of the projects I've been a producer on at DigiPen is that I accepted that it was basically a double workload, that I would be spending a certain number of hours each week of production and then additional hours each week for design. This is because even though I was a producer on a game, I was also a design student, which meant that I had to complete a certain amount of design in order to pass the course. Since I was the producer, I also had to do a certain amount of production work, otherwise the project would fail and then everyone could risk failing a course. So, to compensate I would spend almost the full number of hours each week on design, then I would spend almost the same number of hours doing production as well. Meaning that overall, I would be working one and a half to two times the amounts that was expected of me.

However, when it came to working at Strike Arena, I could no longer do that. So instead, I had to combine the number of hours and crunch down the time of which I could do each task. Which added to a lot of stress that I felt during the internship. Especially as the sole “designer” on the team. I was very lucky however because the non-“designers” on my team really stepped up and helped with design, including one programmer who is doing no design in her degree actually was able to do a fair amount of the level design, allowing me to focus on the user interface.

This is an area that I know I can improve in and feel that this is a skill that could be beneficial to improve being able to work more production and more design at once, so that way if I find myself in a situation like this again, I don't have the same stressful experience.