Once Upon A Conquest – Rike Ziegler

Once Upon A Conquest” is a 3D, third person, singleplayer hack’n’slash game telling a bedtime story about The Overlord’s past told to his grandchildren. While the story of his wreaking havoc adventures is being told, you as the player bring destruction and death to the light-hearted kingdom. All leading to a face-off against their larger-than-life champion. So grab your weapon, let out your evil side and make yourself ready to live through a humourous, wreaking havoc adventure of conquering the lands full of peace and joy! (Which your evil side can’t stand of course)

Attic Barrel Interactive, the team that developed Once Upon A Conquest, consisted out of 19 game developers with 8 different nationalities from different disciplines. My role during the game development process was being the producer of the team. I was responsible for project management, task management, budget planning, developing a production plan and supporting the team where necessary.

The goal of DADIU was to simulate a real working environment and confront participants with the challenges attached to that. I learned so much with the production of „Once Upon A Conquest“ and the two other minigames that were developed during the four months at this program.

One challenge for me was that to participate in DADIU, I moved from Germany to Denmark. Being in a new environment was really great because I got to meet a lot of new people, practise my english and settle into a new environment. I really enjoyed moving to Copenhagen and I learned so much from working together with so many people from different fields but also from different backgrounds.

Another challenge was the short production time. To develop a game in eight days puts into to perspective of what a producer can or so to speak should do. There was no time to make well thought out production plans or do a risk analysis, it was just go adapt and keep going. Luckily I had an amazing lead team that took care of their departments beautifully and gave me the opportunity to think beyond and also plan already for the next games. A big learning I had here was that all the methods that I learn and use are tools in my tool box and it depends highly on the team which tool will work and which will not. For example, I always had stand-ups in the morning but this team made the suggestion to do it after lunch since everyone had a different rhythm, and it worked really well. The great thing about DADIU was that we did three game productions with the exact same team which allowed us to implement changes and test them. If something worked we kept it for the next production, if something didn’t we put our heads together and figured our what we could do differently.

The game can be found and played on itch.io