What do you do?
The producer has to be on board directing the game every
day. We get a certain creative input, but mostly it’s
making sure that if the customer wants three more characters,
we have to work out whether that’s going to fit
into the timeframe, into the budget and whether we have
enough people for it. So it’s all about the resource,
the budget, and making sure end up
with a good product at the end.
How did you get to where you are today?
I started in Quality Assurance. I was handling the
coding bugs. I would go and see all of the programmers
about the bugs I’d found. I would work out how
long they were going to take and say ‘OK, we’ll
do these ones and in this order’. Because of the
way I was dealing with it, I was invited to into the
production role. I was keeping in touch directly with
the customer as well. So just from my experience I had
in QA and with the customer, I just stepped into production.
What skills are necessary for you
to do your job?
On the scheduling side you need to be able to write
a schedule and handle a schedule.
You need to have a schedule that has enough maneuverability
so you can change at a customer’s request.
You have to have a bit of diplomacy
with the customer and make sure they’re kept happy,
because in the games industry they give projects to
people that they like. You have to be their friend and
get on with them.
But then you have to be assertive enough to make sure
that if staff aren’t delivering, you pull them
up on it, that you can do something about it. The team
need to be able to see that you are leading
the project.
This job requires a really highly organised
person, especially if you’re working
on multiple projects as well. On the Spiderman Project,
there was two different platforms; and on Shrek there
are five different platforms. When you are juggling
all this information coming at you from all of these
different platforms, you really need to order how you
are going to do it and make sure that you are delegating
it out to other people and make sure they are getting
things done on time as well.
How important was your education/training?
I found that work experience is better.
Some of the people that we’ve hired into production
have gone out and run their own project, or are people
that have been in the TV industry. We’ve never
particularly hired somebody that has just gone out and
done a project management course. Their practical knowledge
may be helpful for us here, but it’s the hands-on
stuff that’s useful. Once you get in, especially
after you learn the jargon and understand how people
underestimate their tasks a lot and how things change,
then you can become more effective at it.
It doesn’t matter whether you come to producing
from a programming side or an art side. We’ve
taken a programmer and turned them into producers and
that worked quite well. It was good because he already
had a knowledge of how long programming tasks would
take. He had the skills to be able to talk to the team,
so he knew the jargon and he knew the industry.
If we hire internally, we can hire from any position.
So people who are in QA and show an aptitude for it,
that’s a good opportunity for them to come in.
They don’t come into a producer role right away
– they begin as an associate producer
or assistant producer. If they show
some skills in it, they can work their way up until
they’re running their own projects.
Hiring from outside industry, it can be from any comparable
industry. We have just taken somebody from the TV industry
and she will spend probably a year as an associate producer
before she gets a project to run completely without
supervision.
Where do you see your career going?
When you get more producers, you end up with more senior
producers. You can go into a publisher
role where it’s more about managing the brand
– you work with the marketing people. They don’t
worry so much day-to-day about the product. They are
more about make sure the retailers are buying and the
marketing is going out and things like that.
Another role to come from production is business
development. That way you are constantly in
touch with all of the customers, trying to win projects
and things like that.
What advice would you give to someone
wanting to enter the games industry?
The easiest way is to go out and organise a
team and run it and show that you’ve
got a taste for it. Go and read the books.
Join the Australian Institute of Project Management
for example – just get involved with producing.
For us at Torus, the main thing to see is passion.
If someone says they’ve been reading books and
they’ve shown that knowledge and passion over
the last year or two, then we may take a punt on them.
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