The WereCleaner Portfolio Page

Game Designer

Jonathan (J. L. Vance) Williams

The WereCleaner

Associate Producer

The WereCleaner is a stealth-based cleaning game where you play as Kyle, a werewolf janitor working the night shift, attempting to avoid being seen or caught before he kills his coworkers.

The WereCleaner has been performing incredibly well, winning the Audience Award at the IGF Awards and receiving the "Best Student Project" award at the 2024 Unity Awards, while also reaching over 1 million players. press this link to check out our Steam page!

Production Main Goals

As a producer our job is to make sure that the process of making the game is smooth without having members on the team having to crunch to make dates, controlling the scope of the project, and communicating with the different departments in the team to get information to everyone.

As the associate producer I mostly handled creating and updating people's weekly tasks on ClickUp and Figma, building out 5-week long macros based on our milestone calendar, and keeping of weekly progress compared to our goals set in our milestone calendar. Though my role expanded on the team as time went on.

Workflow

Early Tasks and Skill Development

At the start I was mainly in charge of updating our ClickUp. Around this time was when I was also doing research documents for my Lead Producer on things like whether we should use Gant Charts to keep track of practice or researching other games to get a list of what settings we most likely want to incorporate for this project.

As time went my lead producer was starting to be needed for much more important tasks so I had moved into building out our macro schedules based off of the milestone calender we had created.

Change in Tasks and More Involvement

By early January I had picked up a few more responsibilities and continued to incorporate myself into each departments communication. Some of my new responsibilities were:

Major Task

The largest responsibility I took on for the project was our Voice Actor schedule and budgeting. Those responsibilities included:

Final Responsibilities and Overall Takeaway

The last responsibility I took on was doing a bit of marketing on social media by posting TikToks and YouTube Shorts a few weeks before the game launched to help us build hype for when we dropped the game at USC Games Expo 2024 where the game performed incredibly well.

Working on The WereCleaner taught me many valuable lessons and also allowed for me to be flexible in my production skills trying a variety of different positions and allowing me to contribute to our scheduling and development in najor ways

The Game's Achievements

The game has been out for over a year so lets take a look at how successful the projects been since releasing!

Publications

iOS App Store

Steam

Game Designer

Jonathan (J. L. Vance) Williams

The WereCleaner

Associate Producer

The WereCleaner is a stealth-based cleaning game where you play as Kyle, a werewolf janitor working the night shift, attempting to avoid being seen or caught before he kills his coworkers.

The WereCleaner has been performing incredibly well, winning the Audience Award at the IGF Awards and receiving the "Best Student Project" award at the 2024 Unity Awards, while also reaching over 1 million players. press this link to check out our Steam page!

Managed the progress of weekly tasks for each department

Built out 5-week macro schedules detailing weekly sprint tasks

Developed the recording schedule for VA's while managing the budget for equipment

Production Main Goals

As a producer our job is to make sure that the process of making the game is smooth without having members on the team having to crunch to make dates, controlling the scope of the project, and communicating with the different departments in the team to get information to everyone.

Workflow

Early Tasks and Skill Development

As time went my lead producer was starting to be needed for much more important tasks so I had moved into building out our macro schedules based off of the milestone calender we had created.

Change in Tasks and More Involvement

By early January I had picked up a few more responsibilities and continued to incorporate myself into each departments communication. Some of my new responsibilities were:

Doing QA for the few weeks we used to search for a new QA lead

Building our spring team event calendar

Attending more department meeting to understand where each department was in terms of progress and mentality

Major Task

The largest responsibility I took on for the project was our Voice Actor schedule and budgeting. Those responsibilities included:

Finding a location for voice actors to record with the Director and Narrative Lead

How many weeks of recording will be done and what is the availability of the VA's

How much will snacks, water, and equipment cost and where can we save money

Final Responsibilities and Overall Takeaway

The last responsibility I took on was doing a bit of marketing on social media by posting TikToks and YouTube Shorts a few weeks before the game launched to help us build hype for when we dropped the game at USC Games Expo 2024 where the game performed incredibly well.

Working on The WereCleaner taught me many valuable lessons and also allowed for me to be flexible in my production skills trying a variety of different positions and allowing me to contribute to our scheduling and development in najor ways

The Game's Achievements

The game has been out for over a year so lets take a look at how successful the projects been since releasing!

Publications

iOS App Store

Featured as “Game of the Day” by App Store Editors

Featured as "Best New Game" by App Store Editors for 1 week

Featured in App Store Category "Best of What's Hot" for four consecutive weeks

Featured in App Store Category "Our Favorites: Essential Indie Games"

Peaked at #16 FtP Strategy Charts

Steam

#1 on Steam's 250's Hidden Gems List (Peak)

#1 New & Trending Stealth List (Peak)

#3 Popular New Releases List (Peak)

#11 New & Trending List Free Games List (Peak)

#119 on Steam 250's Best of All Time list (Peak)

#5 on Steam 250's Best of 2024 List (Peak)

Featured on the Steam Main Page under Top New Releases May 2024