Hello viewers! My name is Danielle, and I am the project manager for Toyland Tales.

 From the beginning of the project, I was in charge of assigning roles and responsibilities to my team. Prior to the project starting, I helped assemble our team together and scheduled a couple of meet ups to all meet each other in person, get to know one another and figure out how we will be working together as a team with knowledge of everyone's strengths, weaknesses and likes/dislikes. We discussed what kind of games we enjoy and genres we might be interested in creating once class began and we knew what the theme of the summer was. 

Once class began, I got started on creating a google doc for my team listing out important checklists, roles and responsibilities. 

This is an image of part of the google doc where after we found out the theme of the game I got to work with my team in creating a pre-production list and ensuring we had all our documentation covered on our game concept. My team was excited and full of ideas and I had to ensure that we kept that excitement organized into a single idea and finalized as a team so we did not get lost in feature creep down the road or having inconsistency in our theme and game design. 

These screenshots were more of an outline for my team to get started and see what to expect in the weeks ahead. We also had a more finalized in-depth document we completed in Microsoft loops that included our instructors outline expectations. 

Every week at the end of every class period, I would have a quick briefing with my team about what is assigned to each person this week and what takes priority. As the week would go on, if more things popped up or realization of priorities and time management, I would adjust the calendar dates and assignments as needed. 

Giving each member of my team their assigned duties helped keep them accountable and review what was needed from them as they worked. This also helped us keep organized, on task and on track with meeting all of our deadlines. 

As a team manager, I find it important to allow the whole team to be able to view not just their process but everyone else's to know how things come together and to be aware of the project as a whole and not just tunnel visioned into only their own assignments. It is also important to not only check up on your team together, but individually. I would personally reach out to each member to check in on their progress and how they felt about the project and if there were any questions or concerns, they felt uncomfortable voicing to everyone but comfortable voicing to me. 

This is kind of a snippet of a day in the life as a project manager in the early days of production but come back to my next diary post where I discuss our final design and implementations discussions for reaching Beta and Gold.