In production. 2025 to 2026
Tale of Ronin
Delivery for a 15-person RPG team. Roadmaps, milestones, QA gates, and the tools around them.
Outcomes
- Backwards-planned two seven-sprint roadmaps, to a vertical slice and a three-hour playable publisher demo
- Led a 15-person team across six disciplines, with one Notion page per sprint doubling as kickoff and postmortem
- Owned the QA process (bug triage, QA cadence, build gates) and coordinated build deployments and external playtests
- Set up the hybrid voice-over pipeline, worked on the cutscene pipeline, and extended the studio's Rashomon narrative tool
- Designed and implemented the combat revamp and game-economy systems in Unity/C#
The story
What it is
Tale of Ronin is a narrative RPG set in Edo-period Japan. You play as Akira, a masterless samurai, and the game is about the choices that identity forces on you. It is publicly announced, and the studio has shown a three-hour vertical slice to publishers.
My role
I joined Dead Mage in February 2025 as Production Lead and took over Tale of Ronin that March. The project needed a plan it could hit, so I backwards-planned two roadmaps of seven two-week sprints from fixed delivery dates. I owned the QA process, build gates, and external playtests, and made the scope calls that protected the deadline without lowering quality.
I also kept my hands on the game. I designed and implemented the combat revamp with the game designer, prototyped it, and iterated through external playtests.
Beyond this title
At Dead Mage I also led production across the studio’s other titles, hired and onboarded developers, allocated people across projects, managed vendors and partner teams abroad, and wrote the studio’s AI usage playbook and AI code-review guide.
