I led development of Riviver, an educational game aimed at 2–5th graders, as part of a game development course in Spring 2025. It was one of three pitches selected to be developed by popular vote, and since Riviver was my idea, I became producer in a development team of myself and five others.

Leading the team was a big challenge for me. At that point, leadership was new to me, and I had to quickly figure out how to organize and direct my team members. What became critically important to our workflow was our meetings.

Our meetings were our touchstone, thrice-weekly and in-person. They were our chance to catch up with each other between splitting off to work. It was important to keep them concise and informative; structuring them well was very important. Here was how I did it.

Show-and-Tell

First, each teammate showcased their progress since the last meeting This way, each of us knew what others in the group were working on, which gave us a sense of cohesion and momentum. These “show-off” moments also helped keep up morale; otherwise, completed work might’ve felt like it was disappearing into the ether.

Discussion

The second bullet on the agenda was a quick disucssion of the state of the project. It was important to air out our thoughts on the project’s direction; otherwise, these feelings simmered and dampened our morale. The worries we voiced were either dispelled through conversation or led to new tasks, which leads me to the next bullet:

Assignment

Lastly, I assigned tasks. While this could’ve been done automatically and impersonably, I wanted to coordinate assignments based on each of our workloads. I noticed that the pressure of external workloads didn’t result in unfinished tasks, but it did create poor-quality work — a much more insidious danger. Also, discussing task assignments together allowed us to choose tasks we were personally interested in working on, which kept us invested in our work.

Communication

Starting out, we struggled with proper communication: there were a lot of misunderstandings, resulting in reassigned or extra work. As we went, though, I started using visual aids more and more — by the end of the semester, whenever we discussed anything I was sketching on paper as we spoke. I didn’t expect just how much mental images could differ between people; by drawing visual aids for everything from sprites to abstract structures we preserved our shared vision of the project. It’s a skill that’s become core to the way I work in teams, and it was critical to completing our concept phase.

The fruits of our discussions (sketches, decisions) were posted to our Discord server or placed into a set of Google documents. Since we were so structured around our meetings, having a way to reference past meetings was vital. These documents were also used to communicate with the student assistants and the instructor: as the team’s producer I coordinated with them to ensure we kept on the right track.

Keeping it Rolling

As the semester neared to a close, our work ramped up, and our meetings moved quicker and quicker. We learned to dance quickly through the agenda, and I was happy that the meeting structure I designed kept us rolling quickly. I took so much away from the class that I’ve since applied to other projects, like working on Greg RPG with a friend of mine.