Degree Objective 6

Establish collaboration, mentorship, and professional leadership skills by working with other disciplines to deliver highly polished and completed projects.

This degree objective was completed largely at the same time as I worked to complete the first objective's requirements, though other skills were gained through outside work as I applied these management skills to my hobby.

Project: Techno

Project: Techno was a game project run through the UAT Game Studios that I was involved with. I acted as a mentor and production assistant, advising project leadership through certain problems they were having and suggesting improvements. I was involved in weekly meetings with the team, taking notes on their pipeline and processes and offering suggestions for how to better improve their work. I spoke with almost every member of the team across every discipline and worked alongside them on their Friday workdays.

By the end of my time working with Project: Techno, I had created an 18-page report that documented their pipeline, studied industry and indie projects that I believed had ideas that could improve their work and offered multiple points of improvement for the future. This report was submitted as my final project in MS509. This proposal included a SMART Proposal and materials for onboarding new team members with my suggested adjustments to their project pipeline.

With these materials in hand, Project: Techno successfully re-pitched their project the following semester with an improved pipeline and focus on proper Agile/SCRUM. The next semester, they completed their project and passed SIP Review.

I believe my work on Project: Techno fulfills degree requirements because of the leadership skills I developed and displayed while working alongside the team, as well as the mentorship I displayed to team leadership through working weekly with them and in delivering my final report and recommendations, which helped them successfully earn the resources I had recommended they aim for. The work was certainly cross-discipline, as I was a producer working alongside artists, programmers, and designers.

You can view the proposal in full at this link.

Here is the Project: Techno page.

Below is my suggested pipeline that I pitched to the team leads.

DM Craft: Antagonists

DM Craft: Antagonists was a weeklong digital workshop held for creative writers in June 2020 to better practice an element of their craft. It was held over the Discord platform by a small, multidisciplinary team of three people and focused on writing compelling antagonists for online RPGs played in video game settings. I consider this project to be highly polished and professional as we were able to manage.

For this project, we established five activities that would take place over the course of a week that introduced players to the concept of building antagonistic characters and engaging their friends or groups with them. I served as the lead writer for these activities, producing the main text for each day. I then passed this text onto my other team members, who acted as copy editors for this and who created actionable items from each activity. They also gathered resources from a variety of sources to share with our students as further reading. In addition to copy editing, our team also had one member act as a graphics editor, creating several graphics for promotional material and for individual participants in the project.

A major part of this workshop project was acting in a mentorship capacity to project participants, sharing our knowledge and experience with this type of writing. We advised participants and helped them craft compelling characters. We also assisted in graphic/type layouts for many participants, helping them use the Homebrewery toolset to create a professional-looking antagonist page for sharing.

I believe my work on DM Craft: Antagonists fulfills degree requirements because of the leadership and mentorship I displayed during the workshop as I assisted participants hone their craft. My work with my team members displays collaboration, and our work to promote and create it was cross-disciplinary, involving story and character writing, instruction, graphics design, and marketing to advertise the event. Our final product was highly regarded by those who participated in it, and they requested we create future workshops to cover other topics.

Here is my project page.

Below are images of our schedule and an example page from an antagonist crafted for the workshop project.

Warcraft Conquest: In Death's Shadow

Warcraft Conquest is a hobbyist project that I am a moderator and event coordinator for. It is a platform for World of Warcraft players to tell collaborative stories of war in a living world. We run large "campaign" events that are akin to a giant game of Dungeons & Dragons, involving hundreds of players and numerous guild organizations for a truly epic experience. In Death's Shadow ran during September 2020.

I was one of the primary coordinators on this project, working with several other key project members to manage our large team, which reached 45 members for this campaign. We come from all across the country, encompassing different personal schedules and time zones, so the project was reminiscent of the games industry as it currently stands amid the pandemic. I wore a number of hats in this project, working on our main story, graphics design, story writing, and management of other team members.

This event handled over 600 players for in-game events, and our Discord server reached 1000 people during the 10-day campaign. We had over 90 individual events occurring over the duration of the campaign. Each one needed to fit within the overall story being told and be of a high enough quality to entertain 20-40 people for several hours.

I believe my work on this project fulfills degree requirements because of the skill I displayed in leadership and collaboration. It isn't easy to work alongside fourty other people and manage to craft a cohesive narrative that is engaging at multiple levels and accounts for player actions and freedom of choice, but our team managed to accomplish that. I truly worked with a crossdisciplinary team of system designers, story writers, game managers, graphics artists, and more. Our success comes from the good times that we allowed our participants to have and the opportunity to tell stories with one another, and I truly believe we achieved that.

This project received press coverage from IcyVeins, a World of Warcraft fansite.

The project website can be reviewed here.

In Death's Shadow project page