HardDriverz
A 3D arcade racing game in Unreal Engine 5. Players customize karts to compete through twisty, futuristic tracks that defy gravity, picking up power-ups to outpace rivals.
Free on Steam. Watch the trailer below.
Led a 54-person team to Steam launch
Designers, artists, engineers, audio. Cleared blockers across disciplines, kept the Jira backlog honest.
Owned end-to-end Steam release pipeline
Coordinated build deployment, milestone delivery, stakeholder sign-off through to publication on Steamworks.
Engineered bug-tracking workflows
Processed hundreds of bugs through structured intake. Cut duplicates significantly and improved cross-team visibility.
Optimized Jira boards and dashboards
Organized backlogs and filters so leads could see task and user story progress at a glance without producer intervention.
Scoped project work, aligned vision
Sat with engineering and design leads to scope features into things they could ship within a full milestone cycle.
Wrote milestone delivery docs
One per milestone, used in stakeholder reviews. Covered scope, dependencies, risks, and cuts.
- Ask the right questions to get to the underlying issues. Early in development we treated a stakeholder-recommended tool as a silver bullet for the menu system. Focusing on immediate symptoms obscured deeper technical challenges, like splitscreen functionality, that became major blockers later. Identifying hidden concerns early avoids costly setbacks.
- Managing a product backlog. First opportunity to work in Jira and take ownership of developing a full backlog. Grew in writing user stories, defining conditions of satisfaction, and bug reporting. Took over backlog grooming each sprint and supported leads by reviewing their tasks.
- Building trust with communication and positivity. Leading 54 developers and interfacing with stakeholders was a formative challenge. Daily morning announcements and Scrum of Scrums kept alignment. A lead producer's attitude is contagious — staying positive and composed helped the team maintain morale through demanding milestones.
- How to create a sprint schedule and milestone delivery document. Underestimating the difficulty of consolidating multidisciplinary work into a build led to high-stress, down-to-the-wire deadlines. Sprint calendars that accounted for downstream dependencies significantly reduced stress. Clear milestone delivery docs reinforced transparency with stakeholders.
