Matchmaking & Cupid

As Programming Producer for this huge project, it was my job to not only delegate tasks to my lovely team of student volunteers, but also to ensure that these tasks went smoothly.

My definition of “smoothly” for this project was making sure that no one was overrelied on during development, and that every developer had a chance to get a slice of the action.

So, I played Cupid during development. If a task was too big for one person to reasonably handle (keep in mind, our members are volunteers, so they have their own business to attend to as well as school) I would match them up with people.

Let’s say for example, we needed to make a grayboxing system to prototype levels early in development:

This is a big task that requires a lot of work for one (busy) person. So, during our weekly production meetings, I would ask who was interested in working on this system. Almost every time, multiple hands would shoot up, and instead of having them fight over the position, I would match them up and they would work on it together.

This system proved to be very effective for our development, and it even resulted in a few friend groups forming and little “teams” that formed within our programming department.

Hearing that people became close friends from this system makes me smile to this day.