Developing a New Major

Image via Wikipediaproeducers often come in with different backgrounds to be producer, gotta be a long time gamer

panelists had majors like PR/media writing, philosophy, performance management pscychology, and had games like game journalists, QA/prodcution coordinater, industrial psych, tecnical recruiter

gotta know the linkgo, be willing to go get food for programmers during crunch, be the den mother, manage expectations of the leads, the owners of the licensed IP, the publishers

you’re constantly on the phone, in meetings, communicating with everyone, testing the game, making sure hte documentation is up to date and that everyone is following it gotta be thinking about the next milestone and make sure everyonen is on target, followup on issues, make sure everyone has the info and tools they need, has something to do, have to orient new employers, facilitate creativity, make decisions about content that might need to be cut to keepto the schedule

now no school has a track to train producers (not sure if we could have one either -needs some experience wiht making games), very few people plan to be producer and companies usually don’t hire producers from teh outside very often, maybe as an assistant but not as lead

resumes – come up thru development or QA with a knack for management & leadership & written communication, need to be organized, dimplomatic, willing to give feedback and criticism, use gantt charts, balance resources, do scheduling, need general project management skills, get involved iwht hte industry likeat IGDA, take art and programming classes because you ahve to manage those people and know if they’re giving you good estimates, need HR skills like interviewing and personnel management and dealing with team conflicts and hiring

they use excel a lot , make gantt charts, use scheduling software task tracking, asset management bug reports they use software like DevTrack, Mind Manager, Giro (web based tracking & scheduling software – can’t find the url or the company)

producer doesn’t get a lot of creative input into game design so taking a specific personality type willing to be close to development without actually doing development, dn’t get to have specific inptut into game to show off, not showing off your schedule but getting game finished on budget and on time can make or break a game company, producer does help with localization

gotta be the developers cheering section, be good at creative problem solving

let people at work know you’re interested in a production job, still need experience in the industry – but could be the producer on class projects and play up on resume

small teams are 12-15 people, big teams 200+

assistant producer takes care of day to day activities, talks to companies doing outsourced work

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