10 for the Producers: Episode 11

Transcript — every row opens the video at that moment

1. 00:00:09

   hey everyone welcome back to another episode of 10 for the producers I am very poorly production coordinator on the arena commander design and engineering team and with a savior I am Lisa Ohanian and I am a production coordinator on the ship team so first off we wanted to thank the subscribers for making this content possible without you guys we will be able to deliver this kind of exciting and interesting content for you all so while we get started some questions okay wait for the first time well you pick the first one this first question comes from MF 140 884 that's a very easy name you say so his question is nowadays it seems to be a common thing in the gaming industry is to set a release date for a game that either release a half finished product or

2. 00:00:57

   postpone the release date over and over again what are you going to do to prevent anything similar it what can be the reason for that phenomenon so the answer the first part of that question what are we doing to prevent this everything that we can the reason that you'll see this sometimes is because you'll see games sometimes usually ones with bigger publishers that have committed to retail stores committed to marketing dates a year year and a half in advance that means those games have to come out those days no matter how much polish they get or maybe don't get to do and you'll often see those games release patches or something later on to help bring things up to where they were aiming to be on the flip side you'll see people push their dates back when they can because they're they're seeing the extractor II and the features they might have added are things that didn't turn

3. 00:01:45

   out the way they wanted and in order to keep quality high you have to you have to push things back a little bit or else you're one of those half finished products that you guys are asking us questions about so it's always kind of a give and take top of that if anybody's ever pre-ordered the game before you'll see on let's say Amazon you'll see a release date a year ahead of time before any kind of release date is actually published and a lot of times those dates are actually set by that retailer in anticipation of what the game's release dates going to be now the interesting about we do cloud imperium because we don't have a parent company we're not beholding to marketing deadlines or publishing deadline we pretty much set those internally and those dates are set collectively by the entire company

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   whether it's chris Roberts or the marketing team development team the production team we all kind of a say on when those dates are so with the case for gamescom it was very obvious that our deadline was gamescom we had that finish we're game over because we can't push game come back alright so you'll see a lot of scrambling to get that done so it depends on what the deadline is what is it for and how badly do we need to meet it because if it's deadline that can be moved and we feel that the quality is going to suffer if we're going to release it right now then clearly it's better to push that deadline back and make sure we reach those quality benchmarks a lot of games will also have sort of an internal range and they have the luxury of not mentioning their game or announcing it until they've decided okay yeah we can definitely make this date which is

5. 00:03:20

   something we don't really have the luxury of since we started engaging our backers so early yeah we r / games retrain it's good but it's also bigger challenging you can see every little thing that our every second so all we go to the second one alright um let's see let's do this one I liked this question a lot this one comes from our our Khalil yep how many individuals typically touch a ship in some way before it's shipped that's all you so I was I actually thought this was really good question and I kind of took a few seconds to work backwards and see what I could come up with because even I didn't know and for even a smaller ship actually for a smaller ship I think would be a minimum of probably like 30 to 40 people and this counts everyone who is in the

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   initial design meetings the initial art review meetings on any concept artist this includes the person is doing the modeling and the lead who's going to be guiding them through the modeling even if they're not doing the modeling themselves so everyone who is going to be touching a ship or giving guidance directly on a ship a smaller one assuming you can keep the countdown in most of the areas like minimum of 30 and 40 and that's before QA and that's before bugs yep usually when that comes along those numbers go up a lot because you have a ton of people touching the ship to make sure everything is the way we need it to be when bugs come in you don't always get the original artist or designer or programmer who worked on it sometimes you get who has ever available and knows how to fix that kind of bug so it can really balloon up at that stage but we're just talking about the development

7. 00:04:56

   stage very first draft before it goes in QA yeah the pre-production in the production about 30 to 40 people for smaller ship and that's also including not including marketing that doesn't include marketing or any of that yeah just development yeah yeah what look after that it goes a lot our hands such as marketing making sure that our marketing plans are correct making sure that we have the pricing structure in place and at least I mention also making sure that once it's post production that QA can actually test it and I hadn't thought about that when you said like you know original artist isn't available yeah it's the buck I can fix your texture so limited so long people get someone like Daniel kamensky who's one of our artists may end up doing some touch-ups on a ship that gage made right exactly hasn't seen the ship before but

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   he knows how to fix that problem so I'm gonna happen skills do it makes question one um I like this one this one's by gravy hmm any tips for setting realistic time frames especially when dealing with something the team hasn't done before sounds a lot like a lot of netcode work and server tech is pretty uncharted waters when you consider doing better to work in a certain amount of flexible time to the initial schedule when things seemingly inevitably run over or is it more like a plan run runs off track and you start fresh from where you are now this is pure production work right here our job is to create those calendars one of things lisa has is a calendar of all ship development and the interesting about production is at the moment you

9. 00:06:32

   make a calendar it's immediately out of date yeah because you think real reality happened things change people's schedules change resources become available or don't become available so it's more of a living document and you change it and you update it every day they're they're definitely periods especially earlier on we give a little bit more flex time and then as we flesh things out we can predict a little bit better usually against other ships we've done I've definitely seen situations where we have ships concepts coming down the line and we know that some of them are going to have some new unique functionality we're going to have to flush out the the gameplay that comes along with that and we'll talk to marking about this and say hey look we we can't predict this time or for this ship for this time but probably around this period you know and they'll say okay well let's see how that

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    progresses and then as things flush out will decide which ship to plug in to that date depending on how it goes luckily we have a good marketing team who's willing to be reactive when some ships come in earlier more often a little bit late on top of that a lot of the tech is very similarly related for example let's say we was one of our animators mark McCall yeah if he has to animate a gun shooting and if this new ship that we're working alone has a very similar gun if you know historically it's taken him three days to animate it then we know roughly that's going to take three days to animate this other weapon so at least we have a ballpark estimate of what time frame is going to take now there's something that's completely new and unprecedented let's say we need to create some kind of instant repair beam or something that's

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    not an actual future I was thinking it was like what is that um that's something we've never done before we can add what we do is what the producers do we ask those developers how long do you think would take to make this and we get their feedback if we went to the designer they may say okay you know it'll take me it with the data come up with a concept another day to write the full design brief on it and then you know maybe aren't may take two days so we kind of get there by on how long it'll take and we just update our schedule as we do those days and we always try to ask them even if we do think there's something similar that we can compare to because um you know art our job isn't to create any of that sits to facilitate everything and you never know when we're going to say hey this weapons a lot like this one so probably take three days right marks like hold on no you didn't account for the fact that we haven't done this yet

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    or it sits on this kind of ship which is totally different so we always every single thing we have to check and check in again yep another interesting point is that as we go through more and more ships we learn the processes as we go so one process like if we see that historically that has taken three days to do a certain type of feature we're going to become more and more efficient as we go through so what may have taken three days historically we may have it stem so Pat that only may take a day and a half to two days so it's kind of one of the other advantages of having producers on hand and also keeping these schedules up to date is because we see the trend on how long has taken before versus how long's taking now and we can see where those increases are where we need to you know give more time versus less time yes and that's um we're seeing

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    that on the component pipeline right now which brings me really conveniently they didn't plan this I promise into our next question logical chimp last year there is a lot of this one is my stairs a lot of talk about the component pipeline and how was expected to start pumping in the new year since then always gone quiet on this front can you give us an update on the component pipeline and when we can start seeing something other the weapons and shields in the store so I can't tell you when you're gonna see stuff in the store because that's marketing that spends realm but we're actually we've been making a lot of progress on components lately if you saw shipshape a few weeks ago we had elwin on and he talked about plans for components and he has been working on that non-stop ever since we have our pipeline fleshed out in excruciating detail for art and design which is fantastic I took a break

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    from working on our till the end of the year component scheduled to come down here and do this we've been having a lot of meetings about it we have at least a first pass concept of every component type in at least one size so we have an idea of what the the norms are going to be in the visual cues because you know obviously the smallest and the largest size shield generator are going to look very different but we're hoping to have visual cues in there so that you can look at either and say oh that's a shield generator right away so we have the basic concept art fleshed out to give those cues and we have gage working on a lot of light boxes right now in elwynn supporting him tech design side that's what Merriman yeah he's our item component guru yeah so yeah he's fantastic and he's he's starting the design on a bunch of that

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    stuff too so and again like we talked about before he was saying all you for the first one give me like X amount of days and for the next one just gonna be half of that because we know that after that's all been fleshed out it'll be a little bit easier to predict from that point on so I know we've been kind of quiet but we are making progress it's just not as shiny to talk about his ships all the time and it's like I said or like likely said it's being worked on we haven't forgotten about it so not at all it's like my day-to-day this question is by mukki get it cat named that once it's great that new releases of arena commander are always fixing bugs introducing new stuff my question is when are we going to start seeing some of these stuff that's still broken

16. 00:12:16

    from way back when examples would cushion these shoes with ships or items in our hangers or the great cat not moving in the arrow view hanger wingman's voiceover is gone I realize these are not game stopping or hoober important compared to new super cool features but i think that existing problems will be worked at least at the same time as new ones this is actually something that came up in a production meeting that we had with our senior producer Eric Davis lease was there also are our UK compact reot Ricky Utley uh with the hair with yes bull parsing abusive epic air epic hairy one of things that we have in our test management program zero is a backlog of issues that we'd like to eventually get to and what this backlog does is serves as a wish list of issues that may have not have been touched in a long time and

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    they're all rated by priority from blocker to critical and all the way down to trivial and what we have to do as producers is gauge on how important those fixes are for example if we're working on you know making the retaliator flyable for games come a little piece of clipping texture in the hangar is not going to be as important and the tech to make the ship flyable no these are two very different disciplines as producers we have to dictate what these no pants exactly blue is only working on what and if we find that we need resources dedicated on some important aspect of grand commander then those purely aesthetic bugs are going to take the backseat and tweak this finished now going back to that production stand up meeting we have recently is that we're starting to really look at that catalogue of back issues that we have and now that we have some breathing room in preparation for

18. 00:13:52

    two point oh we really want to start addressing some of those whether it's aesthetic or mechanical or technical issues to make sure that what 2 point 0 comes out that these are much reduced and not as problematic as they've been in the past here's a really good one actually so how much of the work you split up between the different studios can really be done separate and how much of it requires multiple studios to work together on a single aspect of the game how do you manage to sync the work done by the different studios that are probably also in different time zones this is a really good question and actually one of our biggest challenges and so when we are deciding what work needs to be done for something you know take games column for example we we try to divvy up work in a way that makes sense like we're not going to have an

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    artist and a designer for the same shape working in tandem well once the UK and ones here because it just that they can't communicate they can't have that back and forth okay that's impossible right exactly they don't necessarily know the status of everything and it takes eight hours to find out the answer basic questions that might be blocking you so we we really try to be smart about when we're when we're breaking up the work there were a lot of ships well forget for example gamescom and UK did a lot of the large world tech and a lot of the infrastructure for what you saw at the demo and they have been working on some of the art for a lot of the ships and they have a bandwidth of course in the talent and everything to have done a great job with the tech setup and everything for the ship's but since we knew they needed to work on it they just

20. 00:15:29

    handed all of the ships off at a certain part the part when the art was done for us to do text set up because that's a very clean breaking point their-their parts in the ship pipeline where everything is intertwined and things are just you know coming in everywhere but that actually when they're handed things off was a very clean breaking point to give to us and we had all of the context just from looking at the files to finish everything up and it made sense for us to take on those ships because we would have everyone locally working on these essentially mini features and they could all focus on what they were going to need to interact with the most between each other on the flip side of that there's a long times where there is a lot of international collaboration Stephen Humphries from the UK office is one of our engineers and what what happened he would work on part of this

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    code system and every day the design and engineering team would have a series of hand off emails where we would send an email at the end of our day to the UK office on what's been progress or how much progress has been done what's been completed what bugs have been fixed and so then the UK would use as a point of departure as far as what they need to continue off of or what they started at the end their day they send us another handoff email and that gives kind of lets us know what they did so with ghosts whatever Stephen Humphries have worked on whatever you expend at the end of that that email reach us and therefore Kirk Dan mark event would then pick up from there so they would emails for what stuff at gos have been completed and they were getting run with that run with the ball until then our day so there is a lot of international collaboration it just depends entirely

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    on what that feature is some of it doesn't require collaboration all and what makes sense at the time to we also just to piggyback on that I was a really good point we have our CG supervisor forest who's been really championing us getting more detail into our into our bug tickets in our database and that way you can not only go to someone and look them up and say oh this is what they're working on but you can go in there and you can see what sub parts of it are finished and what aren't how many hours a task is going to be how many they logged so far and this is completely invaluable between Studios when when you want to see how things are progressing and when you can task your developers appropriately yeah ideally through JIRA whenever a developer leaves a comment on what work they did if another develop opened up that ticket or

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    the task they just everything yeah read the comments they should be able to exactly pick off with the last one left off yeah this next question comes from dastardly within the design of the simulator will there be anything other than support for network devices like tablets in like multiple monitors with touch screens etc I for monitors and Tula monitors are touch screens and would love the immersion of interfacing with cockpit controls I like this question because that's an awesome idea it is while tablets are something that are in the works we're not far enough along to able to give a solid answer on that just yet so whether we like you know peripheral devices to have some kind of functionality and games such as you know if we wanted to span four

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    monitors with each individual monitor having a specific command like once for you know a side cockpit view the other ones for you know an apt cockpit view it entirely depends on what Chris wants the vision of the game to be four or what he wants in the vision of this game so well this is more of a design related question and it's one that we see quite a bit on well we support this well we support that and the question is are the answer to that is pretty much we'd like to but we'd like to see we have to see exactly how the game you balls for time so that's not a yes or no question is just grandpa wait and see and it also has to do with you know whenever there's a feature that we want we always prioritize the more important ones like again to use gamescom for example do you want to avoid this little like clipping the corner your shoe over here or do you

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    want to make sure this ship explodes we need to focus on the things that are a priority and once we're far enough along on those we can present schedules and budgets to Chris and he can he can make a more informed decision what you know if we have you know someone has two monitors we want to make sure you know that the monitor actually shows the cockpit and if someone sits down at another pewter and they should be able to see the engineering scream or the weapons screen so want to make sure that all those features in there first before we start adding on more and more complex features so functionality first cool aesthetics is luxury items maybe later I've the next question this one comes from Aragorn bh since star citizen is the first of its kind crowd funded project that is breaking new ground in computer game development and chris Roberts has asked you to build not just a game but a universe do some members of

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    your team get over enthusiastic how do you keep developers from implementing so much detail on features that they risk d railing the production schedule and have you avoided hiring less experienced people because you don't have time to train them how to avoid issues like those described above I want to address the second part of that produces before I know where for if we have to avoid hiring good people that means burn on doing our job but um no we have definitely not avoided hiring less experienced people like I can't emphasize that enough we actually have a huge hole not huge but we have a very high number for a triple a studio of people who are little on the less experienced side but have the talent and the know-how and they just maybe don't have that credit yet and it's kind of

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    their first big break which is really exciting and it also kind of brings even though you have to rein in on certain things it also brings a really unique perspective whereas someone has been in the industry tackling a certain product like problem for you know ten years now you might get someone else it comes in and maybe they don't have all the experience to bring to the table but they have a fresh perspective or spin on how to tackle this problem or how to solve this this thing in front of you we we have like I said I think a slightly higher number than average of less experienced people but you know the talent is there and that's kind of what we look for first I think and and we do have a lot of experience people mixed in I actually think it's a really exciting mixture people that we have here so and

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    that's largely but again to restate that's what producers are for keep everybody on track but kind of break down how our organizational hierarchy is at least within development side that we have our assemblies the design team example we have art design lead dan Tracy who released within the LA office what he does is he helps kind of steer what features were gonna be working on and how to break down those each of individual tasks to make it a lot more manageable so for example he may task kay letourneau with writing design brief on something and he may then give it to Kirk tomei to make the that particular let's say you using a ship can make it pliable Matt Sherman may be working on the components of that ship so everybody does have the responsibilities on what are we doing but those tasks going to be

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    broken down by the lead and what production does is just make sure people are staying on those tasks and I started just a diamond the funny thing I think is we probably have that problem well problem we'll probably see that coming from chris Roberts Mo's because he has so many ideas in his head it looks so such a vision for this world that will see him bringing up these awesome ideas and will say oh that's so great this is this is what it's going to mean and then we get to make an educated decision about how soon and how we want to implement something but on top of that I mean when you have a room full of very creative people they want to work on everything at once so you may have one designer who's working on you know one specific feature once he's done with that design brief he may be you know completely just filled with creativity

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    at that point is why I want to start working on this and then work on this which starts to deviate away from the main goal of whatever fixed version or patch we're trying to work towards so it's up to the design lead and the producers to kind of like no no you see you still need to work towards this direction once we're done with that in maybe we can actually squeeze a little bit of creativity in so they are creative people but it's our job to keep them on track yeah it's an art and a science working with leads to make sure that people get an appropriate amount of time not too little and not too much because if you don't let them spend some time on it they get a little burnt out so you do want to make sure they're getting also rewarded it's not like any tree or something but we do want to make sure that they have the ability to exercise that creativity while still maintaining a goal and perspective on where we're trying to get to in the game

31. 00:24:13

    all right we've got another question this one is from kin shadow he asks you guys have focused a lot on the ship pipeline in the past I was wondering if non artistic elements of the pu undergoes a trigger for instance storylines and mission generation if there's a pipeline of writers to designers to programmers for such a assets or if it's more ad hoc so first of all the pipeline is not just art the majority of it is art because that what is what tends to take the most time but that includes everything from I have an idea for a ship to in your game working in arena commander and eventually the full star citizen game so the tricky thing with ships is ships are going to permeate the entire game so we have to have the pu director way in we have to have we have to have like everyone who touches every module way in to make sure that the way we're doing

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    ships now is going to work with everything that they have in mind for for their chunk of the game um for that reason I think that it's a little more it requires a lot more checks and balances for ships however everything has its own pipeline a pipeline is not some it's a fancy way to say process how things gets done for assembly line yeah yeah so so there's a pipeline for everything whether or not it's been formalized and it consists of you know people passing off different kinds of work and stopping and making sure the appropriate people are reviewing along the way I'm a good example that would be we have a character pipeline we have an animation pipeline we'd like to do between each phase for example let's use

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    a ship one for example before or after we're done with the white box before goes to grey box or any kind of text set up there is a series of checklists that we have to go through did we do this so we complete this and this person look at this is the lead or supervisor getting ready to sign off on it does production sign off on so to mention leases checks and balances there are a series of protocols in place to make sure certain aspects are touched upon same thing with the character pipeline seeing with the arena commander pipeline anything design or engineering related if it's code related yet we have you know code leads review the code or peer review the code before it gets checked into the game so there are processes in place for all of these and all the pipeline is is like like we said it's just a process from start to finish what does it look like what steps are we going through and it's going to be the same thing every single time we design

34. 00:26:39

    that same feature so every symbol of that pipeline every character will go to that character pipeline and the more the more areas something touches are the more modules it touches and the bigger it gets there's a lot of talk about the ship pipeline again some of you build people review and it touches so many things and that's all we talk about it so much because it's there's a little more to talk about than certain other pipelines but everything has a biplane this last class question comes from Sultan now that one of the major producers is left that led us thinking that he didn't have confidence in the project can you please let us know if you'll replace it with someone better that will have a passion for this project like we all have so I wanted to clarify that every single one of us has passion for the project and every single one of us wouldn't be here if we didn't have that and share that same passion as Chris does and we did I just because

35. 00:27:27

    people have left it's not it's not like if you're here you have passion and if you are not then you don't we've had people leave for personal reasons we've had people leave to pursue dream jobs they've had since they were children you can have passion and confidence in more than one project at the same time and just because you know you can only have one job doesn't mean that well I'm talking about you know mobility between with it between company is a very normal thing especially during the lifespan of a game cycle at any video game company you're going to see people come and go it's a very mobile industry and that you see a lot of hiring and you see a lot of leavin so one person leaving doesn't necessarily mean you know a nail on the coffin for a project or that the project is now finished so we've hired actually

36. 00:28:16

    quite a few people in within the last year and all these people are equally as passionate the other so you're not going to see a diminishing the quality of the game you're not going to see you know less passion because like I said every one of us is absolutely passionate for it so the producers who have left recently just to just to add have all been here at least a year or or many years since the beginning of the project frankly I'd be worried if you saw a bunch of producers come on and stayed three months and then leave yes because that way that might be a sign of I think it's never like a commitment yeah a lack of commitment but that's not what you're seeing here at all know everybody here is die hard and passionate for the project we're here for the long haul some people like Lisa some people have to leave for personal reasons some

37. 00:29:05

    people have to leave for professional reasons some of you maybe offer their dream job out of state or out of country it doesn't mean that they were disappointing the project it doesn't mean that they have less confidence in the project they have their own reasons so ultimately I mean we support people if they want to pursue things outside of the company we were sad to see them go and we're thankful for the contribution that they made and still have great relationships with all of them okay I still talk with a lot of those old friends who used to be here so if you or if you know someone who does have the skills and passion help bring this project to reality and closer towards you know the vision that Chris wants please do check out the website see what opportunities available or in many of our own artists employees are people who came from who are fans of foreign backers such as you know artists elwin who contribute to the next arch and Dan

38. 00:29:54

    yep so we hire them because of skills that they demonstrate to us so they have the passion they have the skills please apply we'd love to see you on board it's a great team and a great punch to be a part of so from this guy yeah I know it's hard to sit next to her influence it nice to me anymore um so once again thank you for joining us on this next daring Beurling I'm still Lisa Ohanian I would like to thank the subscribers for making this exciting content possible without you guys okay this would be possible so it is very much appreciated and the background for making star citizen a reality so as you saw with gamescom this is this is an awesome proximity of part up and we're absolutely proud to be a part of it mmm thanks guys hey guys thanks for watching Tim for the

39. 00:30:54

    chairman if you guys would like to see more episodes go here if you guys would like to subscribe to our YouTube channel and always keep up to date with all our video content go here and if you guys would like to watch episodes around the verse go here please and I will see you in the verse you