About
This Game
This Game
Spray The Authority!
A first person parkour game where you run, spray graffiti masterpieces, and evade authority. Spraycans is a high speed game where you wall run across buildings, jump across rooftops, evade cops, and tag the city with graffiti, combining Mirror's Edge’s fluid movement, Jet Set Radio’s counterculture-grind fiction vibes, and I Am Your Beast’s adrenaline filled repayable level design.
The game is part of UNM's capstone series and has a 10 month timeline, an 11 person developer team, and a simple indie game scope size. I joined the project mid development as a producer.
Development Hell
Spraycans was on month 5 of development when I joined the team as a producer. The foundation was solid: a high-energy parkour game about the tactile fun of spray painting walls and outrunning cops—the perfect concept for a capstone project. However, the project was buckling under its own weight and faced several critical risks that threatened the game's completion. To meet our 10-month deadline, I had to immediately address three core failures:
No Production Process: While Jira was present, it lacked an established methodology or technical structure. It served more as a stagnant, loose "to-do" list than a strategic management tool, leaving the team without a clear source of truth.
Lack of Momentum: Sprints were running for 30+ days, causing work to stretch on without a concrete "done" state. This lack of cadence resulted in the team losing their grip on the project’s core focus and shifting scope.
Poor Efficiency: Without a roadmap, the distribution of labor was uneven. Several team members were overworking due to a lack of guidance, while assets were being produced out of sequence, creating massive integration bottlenecks.
We had a great start to production, but no realistic roadmap to get it onto the screen. To save the vision, I had to rebuild our production path from the ground up.
The New Deal
To steer the project back on track, I implemented a Scrumban methodology tailored to our unique constraints as a capstone team. With only 5 months remaining, I executed a complete overhaul of our Jira environment, moving the team from completing roughly 10 work items every four weeks to 18 work items every two weeks.
Jira Overhaul: I reorganized the project into specialized Epics (UI, VFX, Gameplay, etc.) to provide structure. A prime example was the "Enemy Cop" Epic, which consolidated every task required to bring our main antagonists from simple skeleton characters to fully modeled and animated AI antagonists.
Rescoping: Working closely with the original creator, I audited the backlog to protect the creative vision while removing unachievable features. I broke down vague goals into roughly 160 tangible work items, ensuring every task was granular, actionable, and well-defined.
Restructure: I moved the team to strict two-week sprints and a live Kanban workflow. By implementing weekly check-ins and sequential scheduling, I ensured developers worked within their specific roles and that dependencies were cleared in the correct order.
This restructuring allowed our team to finish over 150 work items in just under four months, allowing for an increase in level scope and a higher level of fidelity throughout the game.
Structured 2 Week Sprints
Usage of Our Kanban Board
Project Timeline with Epics
Final Push
We are now nearing the project’s completion with only 3 weeks of development remaining. With the final 35 work items in progress, the team is operating at a good productivity level. Additionally, we were able to significantly expand the game's content beyond the original production plan.
Level Growth: We grew from a projected 1–2 levels to 4 complete environments.
Enemy Variety: We successfully implemented 2 unique enemy types instead of the original single-enemy design.
Team Energy: Most importantly, the project moved from a state of burnout to one of confidence, with significantly less wasted energy and a clear path to completion.
Spraycans is currently on track for a successful launch on May 16th via Itch.io.
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