Exclusive Interview: Omerta 3 Product Managers

Exclusive Interview: Omerta 3 Product Managers

By SeaShaman SeaShaman is an active gamer and freelance writer. He serves as a raid leader for the Ivory Sepulcher guild in the World of Warcraft and can also be found playing Second Life, Age of Conan, and in many free mmorpgs. When he is not staring into his favorite computer monitor, he also enjoys photography, biking, cooking, and world travel.

The new Omerta 3 was re-released on July 18th with rigorous improvements based on direct gamer feedback. The game, billed as the World's Biggest Mafia Game, is a text based MMO that focuses on community interaction for success. Here was our conversation:

Q. What is your position? What does it mean to Omerta 3?

Otto Adang:
Product manager. I have a variety of tasks but the main ones relating to Omerta 3 were designing all the new features, managing the developers as they coded them and managing the testing of the finished code.

Bianca Evers:
Version manager and Usergroup manager. I handed all players suggestions to the Product Manager and I helped testing Omerta 3, collected bugs, reported them etc.

Q. What led you into your current position?

Otto:
I started out as a player and played the game very actively for about a year. After that, I joined the volunteer crew and started working with the developers more and more. In July 2005 I offered to move to the office in Hull and work for Omerta full time. Since then, Omerta has been my full time job.

Bianca:
I started out as a player and played the game for about 1.5 years. I wanted to be more involved with Omerta and decided to join the 'Usergroup'. That's a group of players that discuss new features/suggestions of players and give feedback to the crew/developers. When a position opened to join the crew I applied and got recruited. This all happened 3.5 years ago. I became more and more involved with everything that has to do with Omerta and right now I manage 4 different versions and the 'Usergroup'.

Q. What were you most excited about while working on this re-release?

Otto:
Often, whatever feature I was designing at that moment. It felt great when I was able to overcome some hurdles and saw everything coming together for a particular feature. Starting our closed beta phase was also a great moment as development kicked into high gear and was quickly moving towards the finished game. Seeing players try it for the first time and providing us with positive feedback also felt good :)

Bianca:
Every time when I saw that features suggested by players and discussed and approved by the Usergroup were implemented I got very excited. Almost all new features in Omerta 3 are suggested by players, voted on by players and discussed by the Usergroup. It's good to see that the developers actually listen to the players. In the end, they are the ones playing the game.



Q. What were the biggest obstacles you encountered, individually?

Otto:
Starting a design. Often, I knew what the main goals of the feature needed to be and knew many things I should avoid doing, but drew a frightening blank when it came to things like *how* it should work, what values should be taken into account, how it could be tied in with the rest of the game and how it should be balanced against other features. A light-bulb moment could move the design along, but sometimes I would need to scrap hours of work and start again as I encountered potential problems.


Read full interview here: http://forum.bbgsite.com/topics/407/200908/07/509,1.html