I recently had dinner with a group of old friends. As we caught up on the current state of our lives and the whatnot, my friend Lindsey inquired, "What's new with you Ross?"
I answered that I'm working on a team project and we're making a game on Xbox Live. I try to keep my response to that question brief because it can become quite lengthy to describe the scale of the project.
She responded that it sounded interesting and asked what my role was on the team.
I answered that I'm the project lead on the game now. I serve as the facilitator and designer for the game as well as fill into other roles when I'm needed. I said that the most important thing that I do is communicate.
"Communicate? Why's that?
This is when it generally becomes complicated. Over the dozen times that I've seemed to encounter that question over the past few weeks, I never seem to give the same answer.
Sometimes, I'll relay how much I value keeping up with each different developers progress during a sprint and making sure they don't feel too overworked or even worse underutilized. Other times, I give an account of how everyone needs to be on the same page in terms of the overall design of the game and how that means creating quest outlines, sending out extra emails, and publishing design documents. On other occasions, I emphasize deadlines and set up reminders so that we're always pushing forward toward the release of the title. Recently, I've stated that I've just finished the task of creating a business and the additional steps that need to be taken in order to maintain the finances for the studio as well as working to form a legal contract for the team. And during the last few weeks, I've added the supplementary task of promoting the game through social outlets and trying to create and maintain a website that's proven to be far more time consuming than I'd like to admit.
"There's just a lot more to being a project lead than you'd think about"
And damn, if I didn't love every minute of it.
