Ok!

So let’s say you want to throw a rad Birthday party for one of your pals. You want it to be the best one in the planet, and the neighbors are going to have to call the cops to stop it all. You’re going to spend all kinds of money on it so you can’t afford for it to fail. It needs to be perfect!

You’re going to need all kinds of things like a DJ, pizza, drinks and everything else in between. You decide that holding it in some random bar isn’t big enough, so you’re going to hold it in Cancun. Everyone’s invited! You hire a bunch of people to make this party happen with a promise that it WILL BE LEGENDARY!

How do you pull this off???

When is the party???

How are we getting there???

Where in Cancun?

Where are we all going to meet?

What kind of pizza?! It better not have pineapples, Daaave!

To answer all those questions, you’ve got to hire a Producer.

Producer–ing

We need to have this person handle all the logistics of the party.

“Producers are very important people – they’re a little like Book Editors, a little like Film Producers and a lot like Product Managers”

– Trip Hawkins

First and foremost, Producers are like Product Managers. It’s their duty to design a reasonable schedule, keep track of a game’s budget, and ensure that everyone’s hitting their target deadlines. When someone is behind, the team has to bump everything back a day because one engineer just broke everything.

Throughout the game development process, producers figure out the schedules from the beginning, then plan out “sprints” that will move and fluctuate as necessary. This is where Agile and SCRUM comes in handy. Providing the ability to pivot when needed is absolutely detrimental to the team.

Goals and ideas are always change, so a schedule that is flexible enough to meet the demand is most ideal.

So let’s say that our game requires a door. And if you’re unfamiliar with the Door Problem, check out Liz Englands explanation. We’re going to need to have this door next week. We’ll schedule a group meeting with the Art Director to figure out what it needs to look like. Then we loop in our art team to begin creating those assets. While the final art is being made, we get our engineers to be a part of the conversation and figure out the logic for how the door is going to be intractable. We also need to make sure that the game design team makes the user experience engaging enough for players and doesn’t make it too obstructive.

Once everything is in place, it should be smooth sailing from there. We’ll get direction from the art team, implementation from the engineering, and design from the game design team.

Often time’s you’ll have a nice schedule all laid out and a good plan to execute. However, things are not always ideal. Sometimes we’ll get it wrong or a change in requirement happens. The director says “Actually we don’t need doors anymore, we’ll need portals”

If you have done your job well as a producer, you’ve already had a backup plan. Let’s say that you DON’T have a backup plan and your making it up as you go along. Luckily, there’s usually something else you can move those people onto.

Blue goo. New goo. Gluey. Gluey.

The Producer is the glue that holds it all together.

Producers must use their Human Skills to manage people all day long. They are the oil that keeps the gears from turning. They don’t just look at spreedsheets all day, they must communicate, delegate, escalate, and innovate with the team and everythinig that they are a part of.

There really isn’t a general ratio when it comes to distributed team.

Producers in Remote teams?

So how do we make sure that if a team that is fully remote is staying on track and meeting deadlines? The short answer is trust. Building trust with teams and making sure that we have open lines of communication is established.

I’ve been lucky enough to be a part of amazing creative teams who are fully remote and are still making a big impact in the industry. It’s important to maintain those Agile rituals to gain visibility on all those that require it. Making sure that the standups are valuable enough to everyone in the team and to make sure that people are getting the information that they need.

Just remember that producers bear a lot of responsibility when a team has to do crunch, or work long hours for extended periods to hit a tight deadline without having to lose any features.

This post was inspired by Angelica Alzona’s “What A Video Game Producer Actually Does” post on Kotaku. https://kotaku.com/what-a-video-game-producer-actually-does-1772519753 and Aaron Feldsten’s “What Do Game Producers REALLY Do?” post on ELVTR. https://elvtr.com/blog/game-producer-role.

The Door Problem can be found by Liz England’s Door Problem post. https://lizengland.com/blog/2014/04/the-door-problem/