About Death Petal
About Death Petal
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Death Petal is a single player puzzle-shooter adventure game, developed for my final-year major project in Game Design at TUDublin.
Players take control of Harmony, a morally ambiguous zombie girl from the 1960s, hellbent on shooting her way out of the underworld!
Team Size: 5
Primary Role: Producer / Game Designer
Tools Used: Unity, GitHub, Visual Studio - C#, Jira, Google Docs, Blender
Timeline: September 2025 - May 2026
Primary Responsibilities:
Primary Responsibilities:
Maintained and structured the Game Design documentation
Created diagrams, workflows and design mockups to communicate ideas.
Managed the production pipeline using Jira
(task tracking, sprint planning, milestone definition)Facilitated sprint planning, task assignment, and team stand-ups
Designed the core gameplay loop and mechanics
Balanced and iterated core systems through internal testing and feedback
Notable Achievements:
Led production for a 5-person multidisciplinary team for 9 months.
Delivered Vertical Slice, Alpha and Beta milestones on schedule.
Tracked and resolved over 50 bugs through a Jira-based QA workflow.
My Role as Producer
My Role as Producer
Production Objectives Overview
Production Objectives Overview
Production Summary
Production Summary
Development ran from September 2025 – May 2026 and progressed through three key milestones:
Vertical Slice, Alpha, and Beta.
As Producer, I was responsible for scope control, sprint planning, task coordination, and team communication across a 5-person multidisciplinary team. We used a sprint-based workflow structured around weekly planning, stand-ups, and playtesting.
Tasks were managed in Jira.
I prioritized tasks in terms of Functionality, Stability & Polish
This ensured features were always validated before refinement, reducing wasted effort on content likely to change or be cut.
Team members worked within a primary + secondary role system, allowing workload flexibility across Design, Programming, and Art when sprint capacity allowed.
Communication
& Documentation
Communication
& Documentation
I used:
Jira as our source of truth for tasks and production tracking.
Discord for day-to-day team communication
Google Docs for our Game Design Document
As development progressed, I identified that the GDD was no longer reflecting real-time design changes efficiently.
To resolve this, we shifted toward Jira as the primary implementation reference, and then periodically updated the GDD retrospectively.
Jira Snapshot
Jira Snapshot
Development Workflows in Practice
Development Workflows in Practice
Scope Management
Scope Management
I was responsible for making sure that the project remained achievable within our 9-month development cycle.
During pre-production, I encouraged the rest of the team to explore their ideas freely by keeping the brainstorming sessions separate from our sprint-planning meetings. This meant that we could discuss and generate ideas freely without feeling restrained by perceived production costs.
During the sprint-planning meetings, I worked with the team to evaluate these ideas, considering estimated development time, technical complexity and alignment to our planned vision for the game.
I prioritized features that could be made into prototypes quickly so that we could validate them before committing significant resources to their implementation.
This approach enabled us to balance experimentation with the practical needs of production, without sacrificing creative freedom.
QA Workflows
QA Workflows
I created a simple workflow in Jira for reporting and tracking bugs:
Switch to List View
Create a new work item of type: BUG
Provide a short summary of the issue
Provide a detailed description of the issue
List the steps required to reproduce the bug in engine
Provide either the Build Version number or Date
Select a severity level (Minor to Game Breaking)
Detail the expected behavior
Submit the new work item
Throughout development I regularly assigned the programmers on the team to review the bug tracker and resolve issues, prioritizing bugs based on severity. For each item, a fix was implemented and then tested in-engine before being marked as complete.
Bug Tracking In Jira
Bug Tracking In Jira
50 Bugs were reported and resolved using this workflow during development
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