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What Does a Producer Do?
🕑 Added 2024-07-01 21:14:46 +0000 UTCGertz here! I am the new Executive Producer here at MCDM, and we figured it would be a good time to tell you all a little about what that means.
It's been 3 months now since I've joined the awesome MCDM team and MCDM community and while I have been somewhat silent, aside from showing up in a random stream and chatting in the MCDM Discord where appropriate (link your Patreon and Discord Account here if you havent already), I've been pretty busy.
To say this is the largest number of products that the team has worked on at one time would be an understatement. It’s a lot and I expect one of the reasons I was brought on board.
The MCDM Hero Book, The MCDM Monster Book, The Ajax Mini, sourcing and producing MCDM Djordi Dice, a Map of Vasloria, and a VTT. We are also delivering regular tester packets, James and Matt stream regularly, and we provide patreon posts at least once a week like this one.
With that said, I'll answer the age old question of, “What would you say you do here?” and I'm going to use this space to delve into the wonderful world of Project Management. With all of those things in progress at the same time it's very easy to get overwhelmed with everything that needs to get done and also, are we going to get done in time?
My job is to sift through the chaos and provide a roadmap for people. Then, adjust the plan as things change.
“Plans are worthless, but planning is everything.” - Dwight D. Eisenhower
Meaning that a plan is not something that can remain static once created. It is ever changing from the moment it starts being executed and must continually adapt until the goal is met. At the same time, the goal post can often change.
How many Ancestries will we have in the book? How many Classes? How many Downtime Activities? All are questions that can change along with the plan. If we are running out of page count, we may have to cut a Class. Running out of time, maybe we have to cut a few illustrations from the final layout. Running out of budget, well that's more cuts.
We adapt the plan to the current constraints. This can happen daily—one meeting can disrupt the entire roadmap—but it's important to not think of it as an annoyance but as new knowledge that allows you to make a more informed decision than the previous day.
What's also important is that we have as much information as possible as soon as possible so our options, when we have to make a change, are more vast than just cutting some amount of content to make it work.
With all that said, let's add some visuals and a simple plan. Let's start with five Ancestry Illustrations done by a single artist and each takes 3 weeks to do.
Well this means it'll take 75 total working days to complete the 5 illustrations. What about holidays and vacation? Welp, with all that factored in we end up finishing 5 illustrations on October 22nd if we start July 1st.
But wait, it's never that straight forward, we need to do some conceptual design before we create the illustrations. MCDM Dwarves are not the same as common fantasy Dwarves. Who else has Memonek? Lets add these in and make them a dependency for the illustrations.
Welp, now we get done right in time for Thanksgiving on Nov 27th.
You can see this obviously won't work for getting everything we need done in a timely fashion, but we are lucky because we have three artists and we can use contractors for work. Now when we use contractors, we have a step in between where we create an art brief for the contractor. This is to get a quote for the work, and so we get what we need back in as few iterations as possible. This is usually the conceptual design work and additional reference along with the specifications for the final file format, resolution, etc.
This final chart shows what happens if two internal artists handle the conceptual design and art brief and then hand off to one of many contractors for the final illustration.
This has us finishing on Aug 16th for the 5 items shown. A dramatic difference from the original timeline even though we have added a step to create the art brief.
Consider this: This is for five Ancestries and focused on just the illustration. There is also the design, the prose, and getting it all to layout for review. There are also all the meetings in between we have for each of these so everyone is on the same page. Now expand that to classes, then kits, then rewards, and all the other sections of just the Hero Book. Then multiply it for every product we are trying to get done.
It's far too complex for someone to keep in their head and things change so fast that you have to keep up with the adjustments daily. To keep things as close to accurate and up to date as possible we use a number of tools. In our case, we chose to use JIRA (as seen above in the screenshots), since it can both manage individual tasks and allows for roadmapping.
We also want to make it really easy on the team to manage tasks. JIRA has a very simple interface called a Kanban Board which allows the team to drag drop tickets from To Do, to In Progress, and then Done with no roadblocks. It's also adjustable if we want to add to it later, and the team knows that they are ordered from top to bottom in terms of what needs to get done first.
JIRA also allows for great visualization of data. We have a Dashboard setup for people to see all the work on them but broken down by person, department, and overall. We can also make this dynamic by having it broken down for the current logged in user so it always shows you data relative to the person looking at it. (Don’t worry about poor Nick there, he manages all of the art contractors' tasks.)
This is a big part of what I do, and the above example is one we actually discussed internally. We talk through the process, codify that process into a roadmap for others, work through making it more efficient, and then present the plan to the team. Rinse and repeat as needed.
We then use JIRA to create all these dashboards, filters, tasks relative to what needed to get done and try to make it as easy and as informative as possible.
Another thing to note is that efficiency for efficiency sake is not always the best solution. When you force efficiency, it eventually comes with sub-par work—either because you try to squeeze time away from an estimate or people don't get to work on cool shit they want to work on and are passionate about, so they get frustrated.
A designer or artist here shouldnt get bogged down in creating their own tasks, making sure every department is prioritized on the same things, and making sure the 1000’s of tasks needed to complete the book are getting done on time. That's my job. They should be making art or designing the game.
—Gertz
Comments
Jan Plewa
I'm reading this in preparation of my first game Jam starting on Monday and it's super super helpful. Also nice to finally know how this ominous producer class fits into an adventuring party :)
Steven V. Neiman
I think that a lot of what goes wrong with a lot of companies is a poor balance between the... I'm going to call it the "doing things" people (creative, technical, etc.) and the "making it work" people (project management, business, etc). Too much on the doing things side and you end up with something that at best can't scale up beyond the initial team and at worst overextends and collapses. If you go too much the other way though, at best you stagnate and at worst you turn evil. That last line is a reassuring indication that MCDM isn't heading either of those directions right now.
Darth yub nub
Thanks for your work
Eric Venegoni
Thanks Gertz! If you’re talking organization, Eisenhower is a great inspiration. Thanks for bringing some insight to how y’all handle the work, we’re all rooting for you to be super successful, in a supportive, non-pressured way 😉
BasCB
That DOS thing sounds like the tool we used for our project manager course in university a few decades ago. Although that one als had some graphics like a dependency overview and even a une line ... Off course we did most of this work largely in things unsuited for the job when I actually managed projects for a 3rd party logistics provider later!
Gustavo
"sourcing and producing MCDM Djordi Dice" I'm hoping for D20 with numbers from 1-10 and not those with 0-9 :)
Mitchell Stevenson
It is so cool to see to many people in Project Management, and have such an amazing person delve into the process! I am actually switching careers and trying to get my Certificate myself! Is there any tips one can give to someone new to the field? Loved the post!!
Justin Fujimura
To be honest, though I love reading about updates in the game, these are the kind of posts that really interest me. I learn so much seeing these kind of sound leadership and management processes in place. It would be a dream to be a part of such a thoughtful process. Cheers!
Aidan Herklotz
Welcome back Gertz! We missed you 😁
Mattamue
I was hoping for gantt charts and I was not disappointed.
Fluf Hoftis
This post is another example of why this patreon is the gift that keeps on giving. Love getting to peak behind the curtain and am now kinda wishing i got into project management.
Joshua Gertz
One of the problems with the Dev/Publisher relationship in video game is that to get a deal done you create a roadmap for what you "think" is how things are going to work. But then as soon as you find out something isn't fun and need to pivot they want to renegotiate the deal to take away royalties because you couldn't hit a milestone.
Caleb Fasnacht
Thank you so much for all that you do!
Niall O'Donnell
Fascinating to see Jira used for MCDM’s work too. As someone who has PMed software projects, which are notoriously difficult to estimate and plan for, I suspect there’s a lot of similarity with this type of game development because of the prerequisite technical skill and creativity inherent in getting things done. The bit I found most enjoyable about project management was “the puzzle”, as Gertz puts it, but the worst bit for me was having to repeatedly explain to befuddled stakeholders that the forecast we put in a Gantt chart 6 months ago is not the same thing as a promise that it’ll be done on that date! Business people can have very childlike expectations about how reflective/predictive a plan can be of reality… And that makes PMing suck sometimes!
Joshua Gertz
Whats crazy is when I first started I used a DOS program where you had to manually type in the task, its dependencies, its time, etc. and it would spit out a list of your golden path and the order for everything. Then I moved to MS Project which is still probably the best program especially for resource allocation and leveling resources. JIRA just added its Plans feature which works great for smaller projects and is already integrated into tasks so I don't have to worry about keeping things updated in multiple places.
Joshua Gertz
Its not for everyone, I love the puzzle though
John Venner
As a project manager on big construction projects (I’m an engineer) this is fascinating to see how PM is done in other industries. I’ve got a whole suite of construction/engineering based PM tools available to me, but I’ve never used Jira as my work tends not to be compatible with Agile processes. Interesting stuff! Thanks for the post
Robert Lawson
As someone who has to do this exact type of stuff every day for software testing, Gertz is now my MCDM hero.
nugetthechicen
Really cool seeing this side of the sausage factory, looks like such a vital part of the process. Also, DJORDI DICE!!!! :D
Alexander Corsbie
I learnt not to be a project manager and go back to being an engineer 😅. Spurred on by the stakeholders who didn't want to hear the truth of the project cost and time and didn't want to add resource. "Just get it done" when you're the project manager and not doing the actual engineering was disheartening.
Jacob Montague
Complicated work! Sounds like I would hate that job haha
Joshua Gertz
Failing is part of the process, as long as the team learns something from it the time was valuable. A big part of the reason to plan and adjust constantly is so that when something comes up the impact isn't as great since you general have a contingency plan and you catch it early
Joshua Gertz
It was luck, I was finishing my undergrad degree in 3D Modeling and had to take an elective. I fell in love with trying to solve the puzzle. I decided to do my grad degree in technology management and focused on project management.
Sam McGurran
Fascinating, how did you get into Project Management?
Alexander Corsbie
As a failed project manager, I do not envy you the task. Luckily you work with a good team. Glad there is someone there letting them do what they do best. Thank you and keep it up!
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