At Winter's End
Narrative Adventure
Lead Producer, Additional Programming
Unity, Yarn Spinner, Trello, Notion
"Every Winter gives way to Spring. For most people, this is a passive event: something that happens naturally thanks to the positions of hemispheres and stars.
But I know the reason why Winter ends. I know because the Wind told me."
At Winter's End is a cozy narrative dice-rolling RPG about 12-year-old Noel growing up in the forest of spirits. Explore the forest and complete quests while rolling dice to see how Noel responds to the challenges they face. The game was created in the summer of 2023 with a team of 9, funded by a grant from the University of Chicago.
I served as the project's co-director and producer, responsible for hiring the seven part-time interns who worked on the project, as well as managing schedules, logistics, and team organization throughout the project. I also contributed to the game as a programmer, working on UI and gameplay polish in the second half of development. During the 10 weeks of full development with our team of 9, I maintained a weekly devlog detailing our progress and goals each week. You can find that on our studio website at devlog.slandercast.studio.
After an extended post-production and beta testing period, we released At Winter's End on Steam on November 1st, 2023. You can find the game on Steam here.
My Contributions:
Production
Collaborated with project sponsors at the University of Chicago for funding, communications, and support
Interviewed and hired a team of seven interns from a large applicant pool
Crafted an evolving development timeline from pre-production through to release on a ~4-month schedule
Organized weekly priorities for the full team of nine to meet regular project milestones
Structured the team's digital communications and organization across Discord, Trello, Notion, and Google Suite
Navigated the platform review and release process on Steam
Programming
Architected an organization structure for character locations and dialogue lines throughout the game
Developed import pipelines and tools to automate dialogue implementation in Unity -- saving hours of work when we imported 4000+ data points dozens of times
Took the lead on fixing gameplay bugs and adding polish during post-production and beta testing
Refactored UI and input management to add full controller support