Hello! I'm Vincent, a student of Communication and Multimedia Design, majoring in Game Design at the Hanzehogeschool Groningen. My motto is "Question everything!".
Read more about me by following the link to the about page.
Throughout my study I have taken part in and managed many group projects, finding not only an interest and joy in coordinating the team, but also discovering ways to improve our cooperation each iteration.
As a leadership person I am very calm, pragmatic and risk averse.
I can coordinate task assignments and manage calls and meetings for teams of varying size. I facilitate group decision making, help reaching compromises and bring many ideas into the discussion.
Of special importance to me is that all team members can voice their opinion on a matter and won't shy away from doing so. To ensure no "silent opposition" to a decision arises I value to check the standpoints of all parties in individual talks.
Core values of my team work ethic are efficiency and democracy, which are reflected in the way I organize meetings and professional communication.
Projects I can take on should fit an area of special interest for me, so that I can make valuable contributions using my subject knowledge, better understand contexts and be passionate about the project.
These areas of interest for me are: games (video-, card-, and boardgames), convenience software, future technology, politics, history, sci-fi, languages and simulation
My experience coordinating teams stems largely from my involvement in several project groups during my studies.
At no point so far have I had the opportunity to focus primarily on management at a project, since I was also bringing myself in in another role (usually the main game programmer) requiring significant commitment.
I have found myself enjoying team management and am open and looking forward to experiencing more of it, hopefully boosting more teams to successful results.
When I started my Communication and Multimedia Design studies in 2019 I had no expectation to get heavily involved with management aspects of our project work at all. As it turned out however, I seemed to have a natural tendency to be the one leading our group discussions towards common goals, always looking to progress the project to its next foreseeable state.
The first two group projects I got involved with, while fulfilling their educational purpose, didn't go smoothly. I did however, take away several key learnings regarding team coordination from them.
For the development of the game Sail Sale, of which the screenshot on the left is taken, I first picked up a leading role in our group meetings, steering the project to progress by facilitating informed, democratic decision making.
In this process I asked for input on game design decisions in general, but did not think of asking everyone for their opinion explicitly.
That doing so would have been a good idea, since I found out that a group member disagreed with a fundamental game design decision (which at that point was fixed) three weeks into development. They were not happy to work on the project because of that and only participated when prompted.
With better communication that could have been avoided, which is why I'm doing my best to prevent such situations in all my following projects - so far with success!
The following group project, which I managed as well, went significantly more smoothly than the previous ones.
For the development of the VRquaponics project we clarified roles and approximate responsibilities right from the start.
We stepped up our use of Trello as our SCRUM-board, and organized our communication with dedicated channels on Discord and WhatsApp.
A facilitating factor with this project usually not given was that I worked with a group of friends who already knew each other well before the project as the only "outsider" coming in to the group.
That likely contributed to everyone being communicative and honest right from the start.
For the political movement Volt Europa I structured and managed an official Discord server.
That entailed recruiting and coordinating an all-new team of dedicated volunteer moderators, with whom I worked to improve the server's user experience, organized and promoted events, resolved conflicts and communicated with other Volt teams as well as other Discord server administrations.
A personal highlight of my time as Volt Europa's Discord Lead was and Ask Me Anything event we organized with Volt Europa's co-President Reinier van Lanschot, which I moderated by asking question we prepared with the team as well as ones handed in from our server's community.
After a very successful year in charge of the server (The team had grown from 4 to about 13 members and the server from about 300 to 4000 members.) I was happy to hand over responsibility to Sofia and Luis, whom I had introduced into the team in the months before.
Using the same tools and setup as with VRquaponics, I coordinated the development of Supermarine Air Support. That however, came with some unexpected difficulties for me, most (but not all) of which we managed to overcome well.
What worked out well, but felt strange at the start was that I was quite obviously the only extrovert in a team of introverts.
Noticeably I was the only person initiating conversation and leading through group meetings, while others would usually just speak up when they had something important to discuss or report, or when they were directly addressed.
While I found the overwhelming silence of the team unsettling at first, I found out that many prefer a silent work environment.
When the arising coronavirus pandemic moved our activities online one of the few benefits was that we could all work in comfort without disturbing each other at all.
It was good to understand there is a need for silence from some, while others prefer at least some busyness around them.
Although we all experienced a noticeable drop in productivity when the pandemic made us work from home and events and other activities were cancelled, that was not very problematic since we originally anticipated being done ahead of schedule.
Those who played our game have repeatedly reported liking the game's core quite much, but taking issue with the bland and poor level design.
We can all agree with that assessment. That weakness exists because of the following problematique:
Our team started out with five assigned members. The fifth member attended several of our meetings at the start of the project, participated in those and took on some tasks - most importantly the level design. While he kept reassuring us that he was making progress and would show us what he made once it was more developed, he did not actually do any work and left the group eventually.
I was too naive to expect something like that and at that point we only had few days left to come up with levels for the game.
For future projects I have learnt to never blindly trust someone, and frequently check on everyone's progress to ensure the project coming forward.
At VRgora I shared the burden of managing the project with my teammate Amanda, which was very helpful. We were able to jump in for one another when necessary and, while she took on more of the documentation- and data-related aspects, I put my focus on leading group meetings and coordinating tasks.
Despite the pandemic reaching its most scary state during this project (It spread globally with case numbers rising and no vaccines yet available.) our project group managed to stay motivated and professional.
It was necessary to reduce the scope of this project, but we managed to complete it satisfactorily.
In the end we had a functioning VR-demonstration of our game concept helping agoraphobic people and their friends and relatives to better deal with the condition.
I have written more about my experience in game design, programming and visual design on respective portfolio pages catering to those roles. Feel free to check them out as well!