Benjamin Vehling
Game Producer / Indie Game Developer
I love game development because it is one of the few careers where you create beloved worlds and experiences out of thin air!
Hej, my name is Benjamin Vehling. I come from Germany and I am currently working as an indie game developer in Mariefred (Sweden).
As an independent developer and educated game producer, I have an excellent understanding of every aspect of game development and I manage everything from coding, asset creation, user interface and audio to marketing and organising. But only in a crew you can specialise and reach true excellence in creating games.
My goal is to give teams the possibility to develop themselves to achieve true perfection.
Integration
Feeling part of a team is more important than being part! I believe that you have to be accepted and respected to develop yourself and perform at your best in a group.
Individuals
Teams are always a sum of different people with different motivations and characters. I believe that listening to and approaching the individual is the best way to lead a group of people.
Communication
Communication is the most critical aspect of a team. Verbal and non-verbal communication, conflict management and team development are my key social skills as a project leader.
A shortlist of software I set up and worked with professionally.
Management:
Jira, Hansoft, Trello, Favro, Wekan, Nextcloud
Documentation:
Confluence, Wikis, MS Officer, GSuite, Nextcloud Suite, WordPress
Communication:
Slack (with Bots), Discord (with Bots), Jitsi, Zoom, FaceTime, Skype4Business, Teamspeak
Creative:
Photoshop, Aseprite, Inkscape, Blender, Audacity
Game Engines:
Unity3D, Godot
Endless Ocean Cleanup - Ludum Dare #47
Solo Dev. - Compo
What did I do?
Everything… You can find a complete Postmortem in my Blog!
My Little Sunshine (iOS / Android)
Solo Dev.
What did I do?
Everything. My Little Sunshine is my first proper released game for iOS and Google Play Store. It also contained advertisement and analytics, mainly to gather some first-hand experience. This game features everything a typical game shipped with, from save games and progression to a smooth UI and a full-blown sound manager. After the game jam version, My Little Sunshine is also the first game that I released as the sole developer.
My Little Sunshine - Ludum Dare #46
Solo Dev. - Compo
What did I do?
I always wanted to participate in a Ludum Dare Game Jam. But I never felt like I had the skills while learning the “Producer” trait. Sure I can code a little and know almost everything about the production pipelines. But its something entirely different to also do these things yourself. This year after working for weeks on a little game project, I felt finally ready to join the COMP with my first entry entirely made by myself. You can read more about it in the post mortem!
A Song for Viggo - Kickstarter
Assistant Producer - Team: 4-6
A Song for Viggo is an adventure through a world which, after a terrible tragedy, is revealed to be as thin as paper. You play a father who accidentally kills his son and then has to keep on living, even though everything crumbles around him.
What did I do?
Between late 2018 and late 2020, I joined the team from A Song for Viggo created by Simon Karlsson. He started this Kickstarter project in 2014 and I helped him establish workflows for a remote team, introduced tools like Trello and Google Drive and organised workloads. After managing the team meeting for most of the time, taking care of stable build at all times and a little bit of QA, I withdrew myself from the project as everything went smoothly again. The game is on its way to completion and will be released sometime 2022.
Last Lights (Windows)
Producer - Team: 5
Last Lights is a 2.5D sidescroller game for Windows. It plays in a melancholic and beautiful destroyed world in which you, the last firefly and thus the last hope to save the world from the never-ending machinery. This project was one of my final group efforts during my time at Games Academy Berlin with a fantastic team of talented people.
What did I do?
Last Lights has been one of my favourite projects during my time at Games Academy Berlin. I worked as a producer in a team that was flagged as challenging, but we ended up creating the best game of the year! I used a lot of team-building techniques and focused on a clear game vision. The team enjoyed the time and highlighted the excellent communication and conflict solving.
Olafs Adventure (Android)
Producer - Team: 3
What did I do?
I handled the production tasks for this project and organised the music from a befriended musician. I always want to experiment with analytics and think that mobile games are a great platform to reach a lot of players. I agreed to lead the team for this semester, as the programmer and artist worked quite well from home. I could focus on the exhibition of the game, taking care of presentations and paperwork and let the team work mostly independent. Olafs Adventure was my first experience with managing a team remotely via Discord, Trello and Mantis.
Blood Rush (Android)
Producer - Team: 8
Bloodrush was one of these projects that started in a completely different way than it ended up. It was supposed to be a somewhat educational clicker game but ended up in a spooky, fun and cartoony way. It is one of these times where the vision doesn’t get together with the resources at hand. It was my very first mobile game build for Android. When creating this game, I worked together with another great producer called Phillip Hoffmeister. It was in this project where I got addicted to the numbers of analytics, and I also implemented push notifications.
What did I do?
As two producers on this project, the initial plan was that I take care of everything hands-on, and the other producer takes care of the paperwork and task management. But due to the change of vision and a long storming phase, Bloodrush turned out to be one of the most challenging projects to date for me. I did manage to help implement a tutorial, analytics and push notifications. But know I know that my job would have been to bring the team more together and build up a solid vision. Its definitely one of the projects I learned the most in leadership in the future.
Alpha Neo (Windows)
Producer - Team: 6
What did I do?
As the producer of the team, I started as usual with an assessment of the workload. Denis, the game designer in the group, already made a paper prototype and mechanic wise the game was well prepared. We soon found a proper art direction and production started. After almost two weeks into the development, we noticed that our programer had huge problems with the unreal engine, nobody in the team used before. We decided to stick with the game engine though as work was archived and because of portfolio reasons. This decision broke our neck in the end. After our game designer got customed to the engine, he asked for an assessment of our code. After we brought support to the team, we noticed the progress we thought we had, was way behind its supposed to be, mechanics were not implemented, but faked to be there. After this project, I understood why its called “trust is good; control is better.”
Fencing Friends (Windows / Mac / Linux)
Producer - Team: 6
Fencing friends is an action fencing game targeted at children. The idea came from the programmer, and as a clear vision, we created a coop fencing game that he can play with his younger brother. We took a child-friendly approach in the art style and in terms of violence and oriented ourselves on cartoons like Tom and Jerry.
What did I do?
As the producer of the team, I noticed fast that the best way of communication was the physical instead of software like Hansoft or Jira. We equipped our war room with white and pinboards and organised the entire production manually. It was a challenge for me to keep track of the progress and to prepare some paperwork for our gates we had to pass. But it worked good for the team, and I learned the value of the individual team and that there is no “one size fits all” leadership style.
Guardians of Gaia (Windows)
Producer - Team: 6
This game was the first project we realised during our two years of studying video games. The challenge was to take an old school classic and combine it with something new. We created a mix with the endless runner genre and told the saga of a protector of nature that had to fight corrupted beings. Basically, Pong with abilities.
What did I do?
My first game at games academy to manage as a producer was quite challenging as everyone had different backgrounds and knowledge. Nobody worked before with Unity, the game engine we used for the project. I was the only team in the first semester who used Hansoft, as I was used to the JIRA style of task management. We were well organised and had also plan B and C, but it’s hard to assess tasks when nobody has a clue what he or she is doing. A great experience, though!
Asterix and Friends (Browser)
Project Management - Team: 12 Publisher Departments
Asterix and Friends is a browser management game developed by Sproing Interactive and published at the time by ProSiebenSat.1 Games GmbH. It was the first game I contributed by organising the marketing campaign on sides of the publisher. After changes at the publisher, Sproing Interactive took back the rights to the game and it’s now owned and developed by gameXcite GmbH who is still running the game.