Bubble Ball

My first project as a Producer with 10+ People

In my first sole production role I lead a team of 11 total people to create Bubble Ball for the Global Game Jam 2025

My Role and What I Learned

Bubble Ball Bubble Bowl was my favorite game jam so far. Not only was it another in-person jam but we ended up going from a team of 4 with an idea to a team of 11 total people. Working in game production has always been a dream of mine so being able to be solely a producer on a project for the first time ever was ideal for me. I kept accepting everyone who asked to join our group as I wanted a big team and a challenge to develop my production skills. 

We started work Friday night and I divided everyone into teams based on what they wanted to work on, Programming(5), Art (3), and Sound (2). Saturday at we had work-in-progress presentations, so I set a team goal for everyone to have our minimum viable product an hour before that deadline to leave time for testing and implementation. Art most of the time doesn't make it into my MVP goals but with a dedicated team for it I wanted their contributions to be shown off as well. 

This was when I ran into my first real production challenge. Most people came in person again but we were missing our two lead artists. One had work and the other chose to stay and work at home. 

The artist who was working from home, however, was very resistant to making a simple asset to start with instead of just diving into a stretch goal that would require creating an entire sprite sheet and programming in animations. After back and forth and trying to communicate the importance of minimum-viable-product over maximum-viable-product, we finally decided to take one sprite from what would've been the entire sprite sheet and implement that as our MVP. 

What I would do differently next time (especially when dealing with someone who is set in their way) is before even suggesting my solution first ask them how they want to solve the problem. If it's not possible to go with their solution try to see what aspects of it you can bring to the original solution. This will hopefully help to spark more creative and better solutions that more people are happy to be working on.