Visit from Firaxis Executive Producer

Image via Wikipedia

Firaxis makes the Sid Meier's Civilization games. Friday February 6, 2009, Barry Caudill and screenwriting alumni Liam ??? visited with students at Ithaca College. They gave some good advice for students interested in working in the videogame industry.

• The big message - it's tough to break into the industry. Don't give up. There are steps you can take to be more attractive to game companies.
  
• Be willing to start small and work up. Be adaptable and versatile.
  
• Communication is key - written, oral, with team members and managers, with publishers and consumers.
  
• Sometimes there are designer/writers, designer/scripter; at Firaxis they have designer/programmers.
  
• If you want to get into the industry as a designer you need some programming so you can create your own prototypes. You're better able to get across your own ideas if you can create your own prototypes.
  
• Quality Assurance is a good starting point especially if you want to move into a position as a producer.
  
  
• Companies are looking for experience which makes it tough for new grads. You can make your own game and take to the interview. It's not enough to have ideas - you have to make stuff. You can make videogames, game mods, even analog games (board/card games). Show you can implement ideas and finish stuff. There are lots of tools to use to make games - XNA Unreal engine, NeverEnding Knights engine, flash... You need to let people play your game and get feedback. So playtest early and often.
  Go to game jams - you work with a team to create a playable game.
  
• The more you know the easier it is to talk to other people on the team. They use a variety of software - Visual Studio, MS Office suite, visualization tools like Visio and PowerPoint, lots of project management tools, graphic tools like Photoshop and 3D StudioMax, Python and other scripting languages, XML for game text, and software for source control.
  
  And - to my students who wonder why I assign strange projects and make them play with boardgames about bean farming and zombie brains - - - see I don't make this stuff up. The pros give the same advice. And they'd both played Bohanza, the bean farming game - ha ha!
  
  Here's alum Liam Collins:
  
  

  
  Here is a photos of Barry Caudill:
  
  
  
  
  

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  • Game On! An Introduction to the Video Game Industry, February 6 (ithaca.edu)

More from FuturePlay Game Producer workshop

Image via Wikipediaa few notes from Day 2 of the workshop - we talked about testing, project management techniques, production techniques, localization, voice over and music, and relationships with external forces like marketing

big realization - preproduction is so much more important than I ever thought. Marketing needs to be on board that early. You have to plan for how you're going to localize your game that early. You ahve to plan what voices you'll need so you can get on their schedule for voice over recording sessions.

The producer doesn't have to be a serious gamer. They need to be detailed oriented, willing and able to keep track of what everyone is doing all the time. And be able to communicate it up the food chain to management and down the foodchain to team members.

Producers can have associate producers. Publisher might assign someone from their staff to be the publisher's producer to seemingly spy on you. But also to make sure the publisher's money being spent efficiently.

Localization becoming more important because games want to do what's called simship - ship to all countries the same day. Cuts down on game pirating. I think this might be a cool project to get folks from foreign language depts involved in games - have the junior or senior game folks localize into one language.

game folks don't seem to have much respect for marketing - marketing seen as a big time waster causing the game folks to stop their work and make a demo or a trailer for markeitng to send out to magazines or conferences. This would be a good way to get IMC involved in the game major - give the game folks experience working with markeitng in a positive way before the game folks go out to the real world

themes that keep coming up

• test test test
• communicate communicate communicate
• get buy in from the team
• need processes to track change requests, bugs, need for new resources
• have to educate team sometimes on importance/necessity of project management techniques

FuturePlay 2008

What I'm mostly doing at the Future Play confernce is going thru the 3 day game producer's workshop. Today we covered preproduction and got an intro to production. Lots of notes, we did a couple of group exercises. I got lots of ideas for things we need to do in the 4 year curriculum to give everyone exposure at different levels to these preproduction ideas. The game producer's workshop is led by Heather Chandler who was the producer for the Ghost Recon franchise at Ubisoft up to 2005 when she started her own company Media Sunshine, inc. to provide producer and creative services as a contractor. Here are a couple of ideas from today's class.

• I think i would like to be a game producer - they do the budgeting, the scheduling, the relations with the team and with the "suits". They have the big picture in mind at all times.
• independent stuios/developers have to prove that they can deliver on time and on budget and they can quickly get a bad reputation if they mess up a project
• preproduction should take up from 10 to 25% of time alloted to the game development - more ya do up front, the smoother hte production will go
• brainstorm often with people from the team - game concept, character names, character appearance, gameplay, look and feel - - get lots of ideas and you get buy in from the people on the team good for morale and good for game quality
• Image via Wikipediaproducer has to do competitive, SWOT, and risk analyses - for competitive analysis look at past games that set the standard for the genre, present games that are selling well, announced but not yet released games to see key features, how you can position your game against hte competition - she says to write down for each competing game - title developer, publisher, platform, release date, game summary, key features, sales estimates, game reviews on things like metacritic, - can do in a spreadsheet
• prototypes are good - show people your idea, play test early on, can be paper or digital, good for iterative design, can prototype parts of the game like new game play mechanisms - - gets people from all parts of the team talking about the game since they will all be able to see how it looks and plays
• milestones - deliverables on key dates key events to track game progress, goals for designers & programmers - have to make sure everyone agrees wiht the definitions of hte milestone deliverables, break down what each part of hte team should have ready for each milestone so each part of the team knows what to expect to be getting from other parts of the team
• she talked about very detailed schedules i project management software that has dependencies and resources assigned, break down tasks to that subtasks might take just a day or two, get a list from everyone of al the tasks that they think they need to do, organize and prioritize it
• hard to plan 2 years in advance so producer has to be flexible and be willing to update schedule as you move thru development phases
• as ya get people to play the prototype - need them to say what htey like/dislike about the game and why - why is the most important and the toughest to actually get, have to tease out what they don't like specifically and what they'd like to see instead

during production - focus on finishing the game - no new features without compelling reasons, stick to the plan, easier to do if there's buy in earlier from the preproduction phase

gamasutra has salary reviews that you could use for initial budgeting
share schedule with the team - again gets buy in, lets them see what happens if they fall behind on their tasks - they can see all the other tasks that will be put off schedule

I ahve a copy of the slides and we're getting a copy of her book with a lot more detail.

I think we have to give students a chance to practice these preproductin skills - developing budgets and schedules, doing QA being the producer, being lead designer/artist/programmer