Pirate academy - 2021
ABOUT
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Job: Producer
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Duration: 2 months
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Team: 44 workers
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Genre: WarioWare, RogueLike
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Support: PC, Unity
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Type: Demo (20 minutes gameplay)
WHAT IS IT?
My JOB
Pirate Academy is a WarioWare-like game with Roguelike aspects where you lead a crew of pirate students from island to island in order to graduate from their pirate degree.
Every travel is a chain of several minigames that climb in difficulty every time you win. Losing mini-games will damage your ship meanwhile winning keep the morale of your crew up. Having a good moral level makes rewards you earn when you reach a new island better.
The final objective is to defeat Black Passe-Câle, an old pirate student.
There is a total of 33 minigames in Pirate Academy with very different challenges letting you enjoy your trip on the seas.
During this project, I was in charge of producing for a part of the production workforce. It was an intense challenge to be a producer for a team of 44 co-workers.
Even if I was in charge of a smaller team of 9 peoples, it forced me to enhance my skills in management and project lead.
My objectives were to drive and assure the production of a cluster composed of 3 programmers, 3 artists, and 3 sound designers that were working on the development of the core system of the game that will include the 33 minigames developed by the rest of the team.
I had two main problems to overcome through this project. On the first hand, maintaining the communication going between the 44 persons and keeping them motivated.
An example of a solution we developed is the creation of a weekly newspaper call "La Gazette du Wario" (a reference to the French name of the "Daily Prophet" from Harry Potter) in which all the producers made a statement on the production progression in a humoristic tone.
The second challenge was the difficulty of managing a team working on very different fields (art, programming, music...) forcing me to be even more implicated in each of them to be sure we were going in the right direction.