The Sealed King
January 20, 2026
Overview
The Sealed King is a 3D third person action game focused on melee combat. You fight through a castle by using tactics like parry, finish, block and the stun. Set in a dark/low fantasy world and a night with a snow covered castle. The goal? Kill the unworthy king!
The Sealed King was developed as a student project at the S4G School for Games between December and February 2026
My Role as a Producer
Project Management
I managed and maintained the Jira backlog by creating user stories and epics. I also planned features based on KPIs like sprint velocity with the goal of delivering a working vertical slice in 10 weeks.
Team Communication
Working with 10 creative people meant establishing a shared communication layer through team rules and scrum rituals like the daily standup. I focused on iterating on these rituals, adapting them to fit the teams needs as they changed.
Sprint Planning
I followed the process of refining, estimating and prioritizing work items with the team on a Confluence whiteboard. We used the story point system and later switched in MS03 to the fibonacci sequence.
Before each sprint planning, I estimated the planned epics in S, M, L, and XL sizes, then prioritized them with the team. From ms04 onward, I integrated the process directly into the sprint planning.
Vision Alignment
I created a vision alignment template to help guide design decisions like defining the feature set for the special attack system.
Survey
I did a midway survey to check in with the team. Even small changes in satisfaction can make a big difference. We noticed people were getting distraced by off-topic conversations during work, so we talked about it and adjusted.
CI Pipeline
We had a bottleneck with playtesting and performance issues. I built a little CI pipeline with a build script for profiling and speed. This later included also repacking to a exe and deploying directly to itch.io via butler.
My role as a Designer
Helping develop the core concepts, game feel, movement and combat. Playtesting and do quality assurance.
My role as a Generalist
Helping with profiling and performance improvements in Unreal Engine.
Marketing on social media by creating posts and videos. Designing a devblog and itch page for the project.
Presenting every milestone the progress and state of the project.