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Producer | 23-Person Team | 5 Month Period
Imvi: Echoes of Harmony is a third person exploration game built in Unreal Engine 5.4. Use the powers of black and white singularities to fluidly traverse an ancient alien civilization, and uncover your lost memories.
Responsibilities
Collaborated with the Game Designer to scope the project and align on deliverables
Contributed to pre-release marketing by participating in developer interviews
Coordinated with leads across disciplines to establish milestone goals and timelines
Communicated regularly with stakeholders to manage expectations and share progress
Facilitated external playtests for user feedback and iteration
Postmortem
What Went Well
Deliverable schedule portion of the Milestone Delivery Document
Coordinating Commitments
My role grew significantly from Fastival to Imvi. I was responsible for the needs to the whole project, not just the level design team. This required learning how each team preferred communicating in order to figure out what we could reasonably deliver. After talking with the team, I would help the leads put together a Milestone Delivery Document to align the work with stakeholder expectations. This document included specific deliverables, risks, and a delivery timeline.
Agile Task Management
Imvi was an experimental project we had to define in real time. While it was difficult to picture the final product, I encouraged the team to use Agile methodology to plan out as much as possible in advance. This paid off when we fell behind during the Alpha milestone — because we had a detailed backlog, we were able to reprioritize tasks and create a focused plan for delivering core features. Thanks to this and the team’s hard work, we got the project back on track.
Imvi's Jira late in development
Imvi team picture
Group-On-Ones
One of our stated goals was to create a great team which could then make a great game, so psychological safety was important. One of my responsibilities was making sure the team felt heard, which was difficult because the team was made up of both Chinese and domestic members. I discovered that many team members felt more at ease speaking in small groups rather than individually. We introduced what we called "group-on-ones," where a lead and producer would meet with a small group of teammates who were already comfortable with one another. This format encouraged openness and led to more honest, productive conversations.
What Needed Improvement
Communicating The Why
This project highlighted the importance of clearly communicating the reasoning behind decisions. For example, we decided to cut puzzles early on. This wasn't well explained and felt arbitrary to the team, which hurt morale. I had teammates asking about the change long after it was made. In the future, I’ll make sure to share the “why” behind key decisions to maintain trust and alignment.
Improving Stakeholder Alignment
In Fastival, I didn’t have to communicate milestone deliverables to stakeholders, so I lacked experience anticipating their concerns. This became a problem on Imvi, where I overlooked a stakeholder request to improve the realism of rock formations. I failed to clarify that this wasn’t a current priority, which led to understandable frustration when it was left unaddressed in the milestone. Next time, I’ll be more proactive in setting expectations and flagging deprioritized feedback early.
Improving Buy-In
It was important to me that everyone felt proud of their work, but the experimental nature of the project made team buy-in difficult. We tried rotating responsibilities — letting half the team prototype features they were excited about while the other half focused on core systems. This approach boosted morale and gave people a sense of ownership, but it also created misalignment at times, as not all features fit the project’s goals. Next time, I’d want to establish clearer creative boundaries and give space for experimentation earlier.
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