Oct 9, 2018

The case for robust pre-production

Game development is always a time consuming and expensive endeavor – even if you are a scrappy indie you are losing a ton of money in terms of opportunity cost: you could be working a steady day job for a salary. It is common for Indies and AAA game studios to embark into a long 24+ month development cycle and realize midway that something doesn’t feel right.  Maybe the initial concept is just not that fun, maybe management realized that the target market is too narrow to make economic sense to continue development, or maybe the team is not well matched to the scope of the game. Regardless of the cause, producers have a responsibility to their team and backers to pull the plug early.

Mar 11, 2018

I recently watched an outstanding production presentation from GDC 2015, and I wanted to share with you his videos and my main takeaways. Pro-Tip: Constantly check GDC’s YouTube channel, they frequently release videos from past GDCs, and there are many hours of fantastic production videos.

The presentation is called “My To-Do List: Organizing a Producer’s work” and was given by Bernard Yee, a producer at Oculus and former producer at Bungie and PopCap.

Dec 17, 2017

The game production process commonly referred to as the production cycle, is the primary responsibility of the video game producer. It starts from the moment the game is conceived and goes on until the gold master (final release build) version hits the shelves – or your favorite digital distribution platform.

It is essential to keep in mind that every game and every studio works differently. Game production is hardly a standardized practice. Therefore, for anyone reading this from a development studio, it is likely that some of the descriptions in the article might not match 100% your particular cycle, and that is ok. Moreover, the relatively new introduction of modern software practices, such as Scrum, has started a shift towards an iterative process. I will cover both the “traditional” (noniterative) and “agile” (iterative) production processes.

Nov 23, 2017

It is an understatement to say that game production is one of the less understood roles in the game industry. A few minutes of web searching about the role is bound to unearth contradictory impressions. Relevant answers in Quora will mostly say that producer are project managers in the entertainment industry. A quick search on the web for game producer positions will bring up vastly different responsibilities, ranging from a project manager role to more of a game director role. However, if we now search for famous producers, you find some of the most iconic designers in the gaming industry are also producers– think Sid Meier, Shigeru Miyamoto, Ron Gilbert and Hideo Kojima among others.

To better understand what is a producer let’s review what all producer roles have in common and where do they differ.