A Rhythm-Action title, made in Unreal, which thrusts the player into the role of Ramona, a wannabe punk, as she fights through a demon horde to rescue her girlfriend.

My responsibilities were being in charge of the team’s Jira, setting up and managing task assignments, creating documents and tools for task tracking and analysis, ensuring the team remained on pace without any issues, and performing in-depth testing and bug cataloging.

Punk Rock Exorcist’s main core revolves around a mixture of melee attacks and strumming, short-range bursts that can apply debuffs to enemies, both performed on beat. Gameplay will occasionally shift to other styles, such as an auto-running segment, a sidescrolling beat-em-up section, and mid-bosses that are finished off with a charted rhythm section. For all its variations, PRE is still grounded in its core mechanics, allowing the gameplay shifts to be smooth. While linear in terms of progression, combat can be layered, such as through chaining debuffs into packs, allowing the player to have a large degree of freedom within the game.

My major contributions were mostly behind-the-scenes tools, most of which were intended to be used by the rest of the leadership. These could range anywhere from making a new automated time-tracking document to adding new fields and filters within Jira. One example in particular is the recreation of an automated rubric and feedback tool originally made in Excel within Sheets. This process involved reverse engineering the macros used within Excel and then creating equivalents within Sheets with AppScript. Another example is with the team’s automated dashboard, where individual members can be selected and have their tasks and completion statistics displayed. I focused on creating tools that let the leadership interact more directly and smoothly with the team, as, after all, the team is what gets the project done.

Towards the end of development, I was asked to shift my attention to Quality Assurance, where I took it upon myself to utilize the information and familiarity I already had with our systems to create an efficient workflow. I would playtest as well as gather bug reports from other members, then collate my findings within a weekly reports sheet, import it into Jira, and send it over to the rest of the leadership to assign. This let us focus on problem areas and quickly identify and remedy any issues and continue at full pace ahead.

Gii Taylor