Soft Things Hit Hard
A multiplayer party battle royale where adorable playdough creatures scavenge everyday objects, build creative weapons, and battle in chaotic arenas.
My Role — Associate Producer
QA & Usability Production
Own QA and usability production workflows within a 45+ member multidisciplinary team, coordinating build testing, playtests, bug reporting, feedback synthesis, and recurring QA/usability testing cycles.
Workflow & Testing Cadence
Created living QA and Usability guides and established recurring testing workflows from build readiness and test planning through findings, follow-up, regression testing, and retesting.
Cross-functional Coordination
Manage tasks, deadlines, capacity, blockers, and dependencies in Notion, coordinating findings and follow-ups across QA, Usability, Engineering, project Leads, and other disciplines.
Production Work
A · QA & Usability Workflows
Building Repeatable Testing Workflows
Created living QA and Usability production guides to establish clear testing, reporting, regression, and follow-up workflows for the team.
B · Testing Cadence
Balancing EBT & IVT Testing
Designed a staggered testing cadence around Everybody Tests and Individual Tests, creating dedicated windows for preparation, testing, findings synthesis, and Leads reporting.
C · Production Tracking
Task & Blocker Tracking
Maintain QA and Usability tasks, ownership, deadlines, priorities, and status in Notion to keep testing work visible and surface blockers early.
D · QA Bug Tracking
QA Bug Reporting & Follow-up
Worked with the QA Lead to maintain a centralized bug-reporting workflow where QA findings, reproduction information, status, priority, build version, and follow-up can remain visible to QA and Engineering.
E · Leads Reporting
QA & Usability Reporting to Leads
Created and presented the QA review deck, then edited team-generated usability findings into a concise review and presented both updates to project Leads to surface issues, blockers, and follow-up priorities.
A structured QA update covering the testing workflow, current issues, blockers, and questions for Engineering.
Team usability findings edited into a focused Leads review covering recurring player issues and recommendations.
Producer Problem Solving
Case 01
Testing Around a Platform Constraint
- Challenge
- A usability team member using macOS could not independently dry-run the current Windows-only build while Engineering was focused on Windows development.
- Production Response
- Coordinated a shared Windows testing setup rather than immediately adding a Mac build dependency, while redistributing session responsibilities around facilitation, observation, questions, and documentation.
- Outcome
- Allowed the testing cycle to continue without unnecessarily expanding Engineering scope.
Case 02
Adjusting Scope Under a Short Turnaround
- Challenge
- The first Individual Test cycle had insufficient preparation time to complete two meaningful tests before the deadline.
- Production Response
- Coordinated with the Usability Lead to reduce the shortened cycle to one focused test and redistributed findings/tracker work across the team.
- Outcome
- Preserved test quality while reducing unnecessary workload during the transition cycle.
Cross-functional Coordination
- QA / Usability↓
- Findings & Priorities↓
- Production Review↓
- Leads Meeting↓
- Engineering / Design Follow-up↓
- Regression / Retest
Serve as a production point of contact for QA and Usability updates at Leads meetings, bringing findings forward and communicating relevant decisions, questions, and follow-ups back to the testing teams.
Leads Meeting Follow-through
- Before
Review QA and Usability tasks, consolidate findings, and prepare key updates, blockers, and questions.
→ - During
Present testing priorities and capture feedback, decisions, and cross-team dependencies.
→ - After
Update running documentation and tasks, relay decisions to QA and Usability, and follow up with owners.
Project Media
Gameplay and development work from the project currently in production.