Doing product management and making games

Since I started in Duda, all the features I was involved in as a product manager were related to online payments: app store, client billing, e-commerce, and membership. I was also responsible to billing Duda users under a unique and complex billing scheme. In this post, I would like to share with product managers the knowledge I gained during this time. The following is some advice from my experience. Don’t repeat my mistakes! 🙂

I tried to play RimWolrd a few times, and each time the same things disappointed me. So why I'm not a fan of such a successful game?

Today I worked on improving my game UX. I started with a high-level sketch. Then reusing what even assets I can to reduce delivery times.

Finished creating the basic game loop as a minimal working software. The next step is improving the UX.

Two days ago, I worked on my new game idea for 60 minutes. In those 60 minutes, I put some key product management, lean, and agile principles into work.

I have an idea of how to combine two of the indie game demos I developed into a new game.

As a hiring manager, I have read hundreds of product manager resumes. It is true, it takes me less than five seconds to decide if a resume is worth reading. I have noticed 3 key mistakes many product managers make and I would like to share them with you.

I did not post a lot in the last few days, partly because I was swept by work. I did have a lot of thoughts on the game, and applied many changes. The first thought that I started to run with, emerged a week ago. I realized that I've been too fixed on the notion that the game experience should be pretty much the same in all game phases. I think that the success of open world game like Minecraft and GTA/RDD, combined with the general way strategy games work, biased me towards the thought that as a game maker I should create some game mechanics and probably some work generation procedures, and that these should create the entire game (I think Magic Survival is a great example to this type of games.) 

Following the user-testing , I changed the movement controls from WASD to mouse. the user points with the mouse and right clicks to set a destination. Once clicked, the avatar progress to the destination without stopping. This was not my initial intention, but a result of some logic from the WASD code. By I decided to keep is as it manifests the roguelike nature that once the player makes a decision they cannot change their mind and needs to face the consequences.