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at long last the guest art marathon is
finally coming to an end
Allisyn is recovered and ready to come
back starting next week but first we
have one final guest here to wrap this
marathon up nice it is my pleasure to
introduce lili scala Fairey a good
friend of ours she's a student at VFS
and the artist behind the weekly
webcomic name game and this week she's
going to help us to talk about one of
the less appreciated roles in the game
industry the producer when James goes to
talk at different schools he
periodically has people come up to him
and say I really want to be a producer
it doesn't happen that often but it's a
great thing to see the industry needs
more exceptional junior producers in
fact it needs more devoted producers at
all levels because production failures
are one of the most common things to
sync projects or turn crunch time into a
death march but like I said not many
people come forward with that career in
mind far more students are itching to be
designers and it's not that hard to
understand why production hasn't been
mythologized in popular culture quite
the same way design has and maybe that's
not a bad thing but it does mean that
often even the people who want to become
producers only have a vague and nebulous
idea of what a producer does and really
who can blame them even the industry
doesn't have a clear consensus on what a
producer does every studio treats them a
little bit differently and breaks down
their responsibilities in different ways
heck we even give them different titles
if you're entering the industry as a
producer your first job could be
Associate Producer junior producer just
plain old producer but one thing remains
constant in almost every studio out
there being a producer ultimately means
being a manager but what does that mean
it's a question you have to be able to
answer if you want to be one but I often
see aspiring producers struggle
answering it being a manager doesn't
mean being a boss being a manager means
being a facilitator as a producer it is
your job to make sure that as many
people on your team are as effective as
possible at all times this can mean
anything from helping people communicate
more easily to picking up takeout when
people are working late as a producer
you have a little bit of a higher level
view of the project than most of the
developers so it's your responsibility
to help smooth over the parts of
production that the folks and the
trenches might not even see for example
fairly early on in his career
James was thrown into a production role
on a project there was a hiccup in the
art pipeline which was forcing the art
team to routinely do a workaround which
wasted maybe 10 minutes of their time
each day it didn't seem like that big a
deal and everyone in the art team
assumed it would take forever for the
programmers to fix so they didn't really
want to bug him about it but when you
add it up 10 minutes a day per person
meant roughly 3 man hours a day for this
team completely lost because of this pie
one problem that adds up over time so
once James got a first-hand look at the
crazy work around the artist had to use
just to do their job he walked over to
the programming section of the office
and grabbed the nearest available
programmer who was waiting for his code
to compile James described the problem
and asked how long would this take to
fix turns out almost in no time at all
it took four lines of code and done the
guy had the problem isolated before his
compiling job was even finished James
mentioned it to the programming lead and
the fix was implemented by the next day
just like that the art team was better
able to do their job but being a
facilitator is actually the easiest part
of a producer's job to be a good
producer requires a level of
psychological discipline firmness of
spirit and evenness of temper that comes
naturally to very few people production
like anything else is a discipline that
you have to work at the first thing a
good producer must come to terms with is
the limitations of their own abilities
as a producer you're going to be the
expert when it comes to scheduling but
that's about it
art programming design sound you will
never be the person who has the best
understanding of the subject in the room
when you're having meetings with various
departments you've got to remember that
the people around you dedicate every day
of their lives to their specialization
you are simply there to listen collate
the data they give you and relate that
information to other departments as it
applies to them you are a connection
point for the very specialized people
you're working with but you are not an
expert yourself it's very easy to assert
your opinions as a producer but it's an
urge you must fight you've got to train
yourself to accept the fact that you
aren't there to make development
decisions and honestly you probably
aren't the best qualified one of them
making them anyway instead learn to
trust those around you this can be
especially hard for those who started in
those other disciplines and became
producers later James will confess to
this from experience but even if you
were a hotshot programmer or an artist
before you became a producer you got to
remember the people on your team working
in that field right now are a lot closer
to their parts of the projects than you
can possibly be they are focusing on
that task every hour of every workday
and if you start trying to foist your
ideas on the team you'll undermine the
authority of your leads and completely
destroy their respect for you which just
leads to a deadly cycle of micromanaging
so once you've learned to trust your
team and learn to put your fate in their
hands after that comes the next
remarkably difficult aspect of a
producer's job there are many styles of
decision-making on teams but the style I
found the most effective has the
producers acting as the Supreme Court
the leads in each department make all
the decisions but the producer can veto
any decision if they think it
jeopardizes the project as a whole but
even
this system is prone to abuse a bad
producer can easily start inventing
reasons why a decision they don't like
will push the schedule or take vital
resources away from another part of the
project to do this job well you have to
be introspective and self-aware enough
to fight that temptation now this leads
us to the last major point and really
the big reason why a producer's job is
so important shipping a video game is a
very very hard thing it doesn't matter
if it's your first title working with a
student team or if you've got a budget
somewhere north of a hundred million
dollars shipping a video game is still a
very hard thing fundamentally the
producers job is to see that product
ship to see that everyone's hard work
reaches an audience and to see that the
studio survives to soldier on to a new
project this means you have to be
emotionally invested in seeing the
product ship but not in the product
itself now I know a lot of producers are
gonna balk at this but I'm gonna say it
anyway everyone else on the team is very
emotionally invested in the product they
will fight all day every day to make
sure that that game is the best game it
can possibly be the producers job is to
be the counterweight you must keep the
project grounded in reality without
producers none of us would ever manage
to ship a game because no one has ever
shipped a game they felt was a hundred
percent finished we can always think of
some small way we can make it better
producers are the anchor that aligns the
wild aspirations of the development team
with the harsh realities of schedule and
budget
this means a producer has to be bitterly
honest with themselves if time and
budget require you to redline your
favorite feature you must be able to do
so without hesitation it'll kill you to
do it but you can't let your personal
desires influence the decision a
producer can't allow themselves to
blindly believe that the team might be
able to get that awesome feature in
somehow simply because it's a feature
they love this is one of the hardest
parts of the job and it's made even
harder because it's a job no one will
thank you for at the time when you have
to redline the feature you love no one's
gonna see the discipline and the anguish
it took to do so all they'll see is that
you just redlined their favorite feature
if you're lucky and you have a good team
everyone will thank you when launch day
comes but even that can be uncommon
unfortunately producing can be a pretty
thankless job at times which is a shame
when you consider how crucial they are
to the success of a project if you
happen to be watching this from a
development studio right now go give
your producer a hug they could probably
use one now before we wrap things up
here's one last piece of advice for the
producers who are just starting out it
is totally ok if you don't always have
the answers at your fingertips
because you're the connection point
between so many
people it's easy to feel like you have
to have an answer immediately on the
spot whenever someone asks something
it's not even a conscious thought you
feel responsible you don't want it to
look like you don't know what you're
doing especially around all these people
have been doing it so much longer than
you and you really want to be helpful
easy mistake to make just remember these
golden words I'll look into that or hmm
I'll think on it these words are the
producers most powerful tools no one
will think less of you for taking the
time to work through their problems and
in the end you'll be able to give them a
real solution instead of making up a
suggestion on the spot being a bad
producer is probably the easiest job in
the game industry certainly the easiest
to get away with not being fired but
being a good producer is probably the
hardest a producer has to love not games
but game development you have to love
helping a team function as a unit you
have to love solving all that quirky
problems that come up with putting
together an interactive experience
rather than just the experience itself
the best producers are genuinely
passionate about seeing their team's
hard work rewarded and can be equally
invested in that goal whether they're
working on a dreadful licence title or
the game of their dreams if I had to say
what you should try to learn as you work
your way towards being a producer go
learn everything you can about people
and also learn some humility there is
more authority and humility than an all
the swagger and bluster in the world
well hopefully that has at least helped
to clear up what a producer does and
seriously go hug your producer see you
next week
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