Noel Grünbaum – Game Designer

Redhood was the game made for Game Project 3 at Futuregames Stockholm. I was Product Owner for it.

Game

We created a 3d platformer game. Initially my team and I had a lot of creative thoughts and discussions around the theme. Out of three options we chose Once upon a time and went with a folk tale theme. From there we quickly ended up with a Little red riding hood + Baba Yaga sort of narrative and related aesthetic.

I decided to be the Product owner, since I wanted to have more experience in this field and to see what I could learn from it.

For the project we had to implement an accessibility feature and decided one that helps hard of hearing and deaf people as our game heavily relies on audio.

The audio you hear is from the perspective of the player character in the world so we wanted to make the visual aid give that same information. This was however a design challenge as the camera is un-controllable and at times far away.

Below is one prototype I made in Figma showing a top down view from the cameras perspective. The player(the arrow) is facing the enemy (red box). The compass at the bottom of the screen is the aid showing which direction the sound emitted by the enemy came from.

In the middle of the project I luckily enough had time to work in engine with adding invisible walls, materials, etc. since we had then already done the pre production and we managed to solve the challenges that arose. Below is a material I made in that time I had in engine.

Product Owner

As a Product Owner I always tried to think about the bigger picture in everything no matter how difficult that was. I could feel myself as usual wanting to go and dig into rabbit holes but had to resist that urge.

Jira – I spent a lot of time in Jira trying to keep it clean from duplicate tasks and added descriptions to tasks. I believe this might technically not be my role as PO, but I still managed it.

Miro – We used the Miro to keep mood boards, a simple asset list for the artists, internal pitches and a gameplay diagram to help explain the gameplay to other disciplines.

Swedish Game Awards

Some of the team, including me decided to polish the game and submit it for SGA for some weeks into the summer vacation that started after this course. I compiled all the feedback we had gotten thus far from the jury and playtests into a list and went through it with the team and we did what we thought we could in the little time we had given ourselves.

We didn’t win anything but still had fun working further on the game and improved it a bit.

Conclusion

Being a product owner gave me a new experience and a greater understanding of the bigger picture for driving a team. My learnings from it will for sure help in the future, both with taking initiative and understanding what to expect from a team.

I would in hindsight liked to have kept even more in touch with everyone else than I did. Now I better understand the importance of holding a close contact with the team to keep a central vision and tracking of how things are going.