A Hand-Drawn Space Odyssey

Sketch Fleets is my second project for PUC Minas’ Video Games program. It’s an arcade shooter game for PC, where you explore a Sketchbook brought to life, destroying enemies and summoning allies on the way.

I was the project manager and a programmer throughout development, which, by this release, had gone on for a little over 4 months. I worked alongside two other programmers, two artists and a production assistant.

We definitely struggled to get through this initial part of the project, but despite a million other responsibilities myself and the rest of the team had to deal with, we managed to get the game to a cool state for a demo. The game would continue development for another four months, eventually being ported to mobile and being re-released as Sketch Fleets: Recolored.

My Impact

This is the first project I did on a larger team. We had a few initial discussions, and my maniacal levels of organization and generally proactive attitude got me chosen as project manager. Since it was a small team, all hands had to be on deck, and so I also worked as a programmer. I didn't know it back then, but my talented teammates were going to make my job as project manager and programmer a breeze. Throughout development I ended up:

• Conducting daily SCRUM meetings, Agile planning meetings and overseeing development progress.
• Developing and maintaining the project's backlog alongside the development team.
• Designing and documenting the project's architecture though Technical Design Documents and UML diagrams.
• Coding various gameplay systems, like player-related functionality, ship summoning, a wave system and more.
• Coding AI for for the game's various ships.
• Coding various back-end systems, like a pooling framework, a collectible system and more.
• Making promotional material and descriptions for the project, including promotional images, promotional text and the game's trailer.