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When the project began, I had a to-do list, a ClickUp board, and plenty of confidence. Eight months later, the Alpha had been delivered on schedule. However, I learned the hard way that confidence without process is just poorly disguised optimism.
I was a producer for a first-person horror game with a team of 12 people. We worked entirely remotely with the goal of delivering the Alpha within eight months. My role wasn't to create anything; it was to ensure that the other 12 people could create without stalling, waiting, or wasting time on things that didn't matter. It sounds simple until you are in the thick of it.
The first decision concerned visibility. With 12 people following different routines, we needed a way for everyone to know what was happening without relying on meetings. We set up a Kanban board in ClickUp with color-coding for each sub-team and integrated everything into Discord, so every card update became an automatic notification in the channel.
The classic “Hey, what’s the status on this?” basically vanished. It was one of the best decisions of the project, and also where one of our main issues stayed hidden for far too long.
Weeks passed, assets arrived, tasks were completed, and the board was looking very “green.” I actually felt excellent about it. Then, one day, I opened everything up side-by-side and realized it wasn't the same game. One artist had interpreted “horror” as something tense and psychological. Another had gone for much grittier, heavier references. One level designer was creating corridors that suffocated the player, while another was building open spaces for confrontation. Technically, everything worked. Creatively, it looked like a Frankenstein’s monster.
The problem was that I had never provided a common reference point. I had described the game in words, but words are interpreted differently by different people. The solution was to create an Art Bible with concrete visual examples, scene captures, palettes, and references from other games and films. Thereafter, the assets began to “talk” to each other. However, it cost us several weeks of rework that could have been avoided.
Later in development, the project seemed healthy: tasks were in progress everywhere, and the team was busy. Yet, the final deliverables weren't arriving. I went to investigate and found a perfect “blocking triangle”: the developer was waiting for level design to be finalized to integrate the enemy AI; the level designer was waiting for final assets; and the artist was waiting for technical definitions to avoid having to rework everything later. Everyone was stalled because of someone else, and no one had said anything because everyone assumed the problem lay on the other side.
The root cause was simple: tasks were created without mapping out what each one needed to begin. Once we added a mandatory field to the cards addressing this, dependencies started surfacing during planning rather than during delivery week. A pretty board is no substitute for mapped dependencies. I learned that the hard way.
Dependencies should have been mapped before the first sprint. While the color-coded Kanban was great for showing individual status, it was terrible at showing how tasks relied on one another to progress.
The Alpha was delivered. ✅
The next phase involved seeking investors to present what we had built, and that was where my participation ended. I don't know what happened next. But what stays with me is the cycle we completed: 12 people, fully remote, a light process, real visibility, and a complex milestone delivered on time.