Hane: Pillars of the Sky is an 3rd person flight and cozy game in which you play as Hane, a bird that has lost its song and must recover it while assisting the new inhabitants of ancient ruins. Players can fly through these ruins, collect feathers to unlock cosmetics, and find songbirds to regain their song.

In this project, I took on the roles of a Product Manager and Developer. For management, we used Jira and Confluence and I mainly focused on:

Management
Menus
Quests
Dialogues
SFXs using FMOD

This game won the Publishers' Choice award at ENTI-UB's DemoDay 2024.

My Contributions

Jira

The development process was organized using the Scrumban methodology as a foundation. Two-week sprints were established, including a sprint 0 to familiarize all team members with the workflow.

A production plan was developed to assess the viability of the project's scope given the available resources, while also clarifying responsibilities for each team member.

Automations were implemented to track data, address bottlenecks, and assist with ticket validation.

Meetings & Confluence

Weekly meetings were conducted to review progress, discuss current tasks, and assess the project's direction. Additionally, sprint planning meetings were held to evaluate upcoming tasks and the team's availability. Finally, a retrospective meeting which allowed the team to comment on things that wouldn’t have otherwise been addressed in a more enjoyable and creative way.

A Confluence space was created log all design and task decisions or changes. Additionally, it helped by allowing us to take meetings notes, which helped generate tasks and properly define priorities.

Quests System & UIs

The quest system was implemented using the FlowGraph plugin, allowing for the creation of a node-based flow that represents each step of a quest, from interacting with an NPC to detecting when the player performs the correct note sequences.

As the project focussed on the use of a controller, the engine default menus had to addapt to it, thus Common UI was used for their development. Moreover, the dialogue system was programmed to display text letter by letter, including tags, ensuring that rich text was being rendered correctly.

Project details

Engine: Unreal Engine 5

Time: 6 months half-time

The project had defined roles and included members from other disciplines like artists and a musician.

Postmortem

The project experienced a shift in setting during the initial months of development due to a bottleneck in the art pipeline, and a general lack of appeal for the original setting. This issue was resolved by pivoting the game's setting from an island caught in civil war to the current version of Hane, allowing the team to incorporate more fantasy elements in a cartoony style. This change enabled the creation of characters and environments that were less detailed but more playful and visually appealing.

Working with people from other disciplines is great as it helps us adapt and get new prespectives on the development process. That being said, it also provides new challenges, as these new prespectives might clash with eachother.

The meetings, documentation, and note-taking were very helpful in aligning the team and defining the next steps. However, some elements had to be adjusted on the spot, and certain decisions were made unilaterally by one or two members. When this occurred, the issue was addressed by discussing it with those involved.