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hello again as of this week allison is
officially on her break so she can
recover and i think you know what that
means
yes guest artist marathon over the next
few weeks or months I don't know we'll
be bringing in a bunch of guest artists
to help us out I think this is gonna
turn out to be rather fun
on that note say hello to Molly Maloney
she's a concept artist currently working
for her MFA out in San Francisco and
she's here to help us talk about
pre-production huh how come we haven't
talked about this before
I guess we're usually more about
offering possible solutions to problems
rather than just raising them but this
is one of those problems that I'm not
sure we've got a great answer for
unfortunately it's a pretty big issue so
hopefully talking about it will at least
provide some perspective on the industry
most bad video games are the result of
bad production methodology that is to
say bad planning I know that sounds
super obvious but here's a specific case
that's unbelievably common in our
industry and it's responsible for a
plethora of bad games the complete lack
of pre-production pre-production is the
time when you try to figure everything
out before you actually start building
it basically the planning phase not
having enough at this time means things
like story characterization art style
even mechanics get pushed into the will
figure it out later Ben now as I'm sure
most of you know planning is everything
especially for big productions not
having enough time to think about stuff
before you just jump in and try to make
it is almost guaranteed to cause
problems it's obvious to you it's
obvious to me and it's obvious to
everybody working in the industry today
too so the question becomes why aren't
studios making time for pre-production
after all pre-production should be the
cheapest period in a game development
cycle you don't need nearly as much
staff as you do an actual production and
investing in that pre-production time is
likely to save a studio money in the end
unfortunately there's one court unique
to video games that prevents this and
that's the question of what do you do
with all of your programmers during full
production you're gonna need a lot of
programmers to put together all the
technology that goes into making a game
but in pre-production there's really not
much for them to do you'll need a few
veteran programmers to investigate what
technology you want to use so you can
create unique features for your new
title but when you already have an
engine to work with from a previous
project or you have licensed an engine
like unreal there's just not much work
there for a software engineer before any
key decisions have been made about the
game they're gonna build sure a few of
the engine guys can tinker with the
engine and optimize it a bit and the
shader guys might experiment with new
shaders which can be an integral part of
establishing the art style but
what about the gameplay guys are the
networking guys they're stuck doing
busywork
are coming in for half days and
programmers are expensive when you
factor in salary insurance and paying
rent for workspace as well as paying for
the licenses and technology they're
gonna be using a mid-level programmer in
Seattle runs roughly a hundred and ten
thousand dollars a year or eight
thousand two hundred and fifty dollars a
month say your standard midsize
developer has about 30 programmers on a
triple a project now let's say maybe ten
of them can do anything worthwhile
during pre-production that means you're
wasting a hundred and sixty-five
thousand dollars per month you spend in
pre-production or put another way more
than one and a half man years of
engineering time those are men hours you
could have spent actually building your
game this is almost impossible to
justify and many of the corporate
hierarchies we have set up and it's even
harder to justify to investors when you
add to this the internal social pressure
at studios to get people work to do
you can see how naturally pre-production
often gets cut short so there it is in a
nutshell the problem of finding enough
pre-production time it's one that
plagues our industry and ruins many
multi-million dollar projects now like
me many of you are probably thinking
well with a little better planning this
could be solved by yanking the
pre-production team off the studio's
current project a few months early the
cutesy answer to that is oh with a
little better planning we could do a
little better planning you don't say but
joking aside I actually suspect that is
the solution to this problem there are a
few reasons why game Studios aren't
doing it that way now first it would
require them to move high-level staff
off a product shortly before it ships
unfortunately the way this industry runs
games tend to be all hands on deck
affairs near the end and even when
they're not games have another weird
quirk the more of a game you build the
more you realize how you could have done
it better
James has never worked on the game
project where they managed to get in
every feature they wanted and I don't
know anybody else who has either this
means that even on projects which are
coming together perfectly
people tend to want to see if they can
squeeze in just a few more awesome
features from the design document that
they thought they were gonna have to cut
or see if they can get one more
iteration in on some of the things they
didn't know we're wrong till they
actually got to play test the game
themselves which in the end leads to no
one wanting to jump ship to pre produce
the next project well that in the weird
sense of guilt industry folks seem to
get about doing pre-production while
their studio mates are still slaving
away at the last game for some reason
people tend to think of pre-production
as not real work ironically
pre-production can also lead the
productivity issues especially when your
team is just coming off a long crunch
where deadlines were specified down to
the hour
pre-production time can lead to a
feeling of having all
the time in the world and things start
to run less efficiently as people
recover okay so we have a few problems
to solve here but games aren't the only
high-tech multidisciplinary artform out
there how are those other industries
doing it maybe we can learn from them
let's start by looking at the film
industry when a movies finished the cast
and crew and everybody involved go their
separate ways the people involved in
pre-production start developing new
projects and the main production staff
joined other projects that are just
coming out of the pre-production phase
it works just fine for film but I'm not
really sure this model fits the game
industry as it's currently structured
keeping a development team together
tends to be more important in games than
in film or at least that's the
conventional industry wisdom not really
sure how true it is even if it's not
though there's also the fact that we
don't have agents in our industry hiring
and job seeking are such a nightmare in
games no one wants to try to staff up a
project every time they start a new one
besides people working in the game
industry tend not to like that kind of
risk many developers want to know
they're gonna have a job after the game
ships and it's tragic how often they
won't anyway so the film industry may
not be the ideal role model but I think
I know another one that might be
animation maybe it's just because
animation is my industry or maybe it's
because Pixar has liked most game
studios and that they keep their staff
from project to project but I think the
model might work Pixar generally spends
at least two years in the story in
pre-production phase for every film but
the vast majority of the crew is working
on a different project at the time
you've got your main bulk workforce of
artists all the modelers animators and
lighters and such and most of them are
probably working on the current main
project trying to get the film finished
in time for theatrical release but all
the while there's always another
director working with a small team on
the next film in line for finding the
story reels and doing R&D on the
technology they'll need meanwhile yet
another director is working with a
handful of guys from the story
department putting together early
storyboards for the next film in line
and all of those directors probably have
ideas in mind for the next film they
want to pitch so at any given time
you've got your main force working hard
on a project and by the time they've
finished there's always another project
ready for them to jump to now I am
definitely no expert on this sort of
thing but I think the system has some
merit even if you keep things limited to
just two projects one in production and
one being planned by a small team of
leads there's always a project to work
on and another one in the chamber ready
to go all the benefits of planning ahead
with none of the downtime now despite
everything I've been saying it's
probably worth reminding all of you
budding developers out there that it's
very very easy to get trapped in the
pre-production phase when you have no
deadlines
James sees a lot of excited young guys
fall into the trap of
constantly revising design documents
drawing sketches of their world and
talking about their game but never
actually starting to build anything it's
important to know when to stop planning
and start building and you should never
be afraid to prototype your ideas early
on but the value of spending this time
thinking before we begin to build cannot
be overstated there have been a few
games out there that ended up getting an
extended pre-production time Bioshock
fallout 3 portal I think the results
speak for themselves it's one of the few
things most developers can agree on but
failing to get this time is endemic to
the way we build games I will say this
whichever developer solves this
pre-production problem is already
halfway to being the next valve Bioware
or Blizzard if any of you guys work in
games and have some thoughts or ideas on
the matter get in touch with us because
we'd love to hear them Thank You Molly
for the pretty pictures thanks for
watching and see you next week
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