10 for the Producers: Episode 12

Transcript — every row opens the video at that moment

1. 00:00:00

   [Music] hey everybody and welcome back to 10 for the producers uh we haven't done these in a little while so we're really excited to go through these awesome questions but before we get started we wanted to thank the subscribers for allowing us to do this enhanced content um it's because of you guys that we can even do this and share this information and it's um it's really cool it's really cool to be able to share this this these Det details and get in front of camera and just talk to you as much as we possibly can and interact with you on the forums and all the other social media that we do so thank you very much for allowing us to do this so to get this started our amazing 10 questions Darion I'm not going to introduce who you are apparently I'm just gonna start talking I'm here K Davis with I forget who I oh Daren War all right daran's

2. 00:00:49

   gonna start us off go ahead all right the first one uh we've got a question from Doc as a producer you get to see an in-depth look of the game and how people work on the different systems are there any specific things you always wanted to do or wish you could do yourself if you had the skills for it what assets would be your favorite to work on I guess kind of like a bucket dream list like if we could work on other aspects of the game what we want to do yeah what would yours be oh man I was thinking about this a lot well my uh if you watch the um the get to know the dev whatever it was me the dev um I talked about my background is animation so I actually got out of college thinking I was going to be an animator so I SP yours or mine that's yours I spent a lot of time um learning the craft of Animation getting degree in acting uh just all the things that you need for a good solid performance of a character um and so that was actually the path I was going in so for me what I

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   would love to do or would I love have done is that's where I would dig into probably too much is the animation side performance and characters and just conveying U um a story because I love telling stories so like this is your leading role as a senior producer that's guess you been cast as senior producer I guess and this your scpt and I'm going to act someone out I don't know yeah so that'd be what about you probably the Laur writing aspect uh given that I've got a background in publishing and uh writing I would love to I guess be a project manager or just kind of oversee just how the writing develops yeah sure um creating that kind of Mythos is something that's incredibly interesting to me and just on top of that I have I have a deep seated love for traditional printed media there's there's something kind of romantically classy about you know holding a book in your hand and

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   knowing that this is something that you had a hand in putting together yeah so but but I like I actually like what I'm doing here being able to interact with developers on design and Engineering it it it's different for anything else that I've ever done so and like I like new things there you go so there you go that's what we would enjoy to work on if we weren't already doing what we love which is this okay all right next question from grais as a producer you maintain an overview of the project progress and coordinate the disciplines art design Etc to bring together a final product in the game ship location Etc however to main the overview you need to be a bit in the detail of each discipline how do you draw the line between maintaining an overview and going too far down the detailed Rabbit Hole give us an example this is a question that I think we've

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   both been looking for or at least at least we've been kind of waiting for this question to be able to answer it yeah this one's it's a it's a it's it's very tough it's very tough um you know we're going to get to later I think there's a question about ownership but the you know when we talk about what our backgrounds are what we're experiencing or what we know will tend to spend a little bit more time in those right so you hire different production I feel like with different skill sets to provide you different perspectives um and so if you have a producer that's very technical they may know a little bit more about the details so they can answer those questions better as you said in that post no enough to be dangerous right yes I actually got that from senior producer Jason Hutchins yeah it's great it's it's exactly right um so I think the the question is how do you draw the line you just got to figure out what you need to dig into for me right like it's good to have an overview to schedule it and to plan it and to work with your leads and your your team but

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   then sometimes you have to get into the weeds right you have to dig in even further so there's it's not necessarily you shouldn't do one or the other I think it's more you do each in different times right that and when I first started here like I wasn't a CO I'm not a coder I'm not a programmer I'm not an engineer yeah so there was a little bit of a a feeling of displacement when I first started here cuz I wasn't really sure if I'd be able to talk at the level that's necessary with with the engineers and designers but just you know through sheer saturation I feel like at least carry on a semi- decent intelligent conversation that doesn't rely on just Grunts and pointing so having to be able to have a conversation regarding you know the item system or the entity token system with the developers like you heard on our phone call this morning yeah um I I think we should know enough just to be able to ask questions on how progress is going yeah and know when

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   someone is I guess kind of bluffing us yeah so we have to be able to read uh what's word I'm looking for I guess anticipate what the needs of that particular discipline are without being H we don't need to be experts in it we just need to know enough just to be able to converse with the developers and be able to manage those tasks sure so give us an example I think you already started talking about one The Entity token right yes so how did you manage that how did you draw the line between how far did you have to go versus I just need to stay back and help you guys get it done so for reference this is we were talking about a a phone call or Skype call we had this morning with our UK office with one of our programmers Stephen humph and he's in charge of our our entity token which kind of the sequel to ghost so I am not fluent in flow graph in cry engine but with the way that the entity token system is working I know enough

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   about what they were trying to accomplish with it to at least know what the end goal is what they were trying to do to get there where the voids are if a certain person leaves a a part of the aspect of this project what what more resources do we need to allocate to that and knowing on who has what skill set is absolutely necessary I guess not knowledge to have in order to be able to fulfill that void so with in talking to Mr humph we knew that he was making progress on certain aspect certain concept I need to be able to ask how far is he what's he going where's he going with it and I had to be able to converse with him at a level enough where it showed that I understood what he's trying to do yeah I would say lastly I was just kind of rereading this but how to maintain that overview that's kind of the point of production right like we we are we are the third party perspective We Are The Outsider we

9. 00:06:26

   aren't in the weeds per se so we're able to get a larger over so I think intrinsically by being production and by being required to not know everything down to its base level that allows us to keep that overview right um and so then we choose as producers where we should learn more information to help understand that better it actually becomes a double-edged sword because the more technical detail you have where does it stop where the producer starts getting more involved with the actual techn like for example if he's do if the producer can read code or write code does that mean he's going to start jumping in and changing people's code when he sees a mistake or he feel something's more more should be changed that's right that should be up to the designers and the programmers and producers should basically just be there to guide them towards a specific objective totally and not interfere with what the designer and programmers is doing absolutely yep great question our third question comes from Steve Hunter how do you make task duration estimates

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    when situations like technical blockers pop up so I don't I don't think one is necessarily contingent upon the other uh one of the things we do is we we talk to the developers ask them how long do they think it'll take and this is based this is predicated on on their knowledge whether they've done this or not if it's something they've already done we as producers will have a good idea of how long it's taken them in the past now we look at the scale of what they're doing and we kind of upscale it or downscale it based on the project needs yeah uh if pop up well something that we've mentioned in many of our 10 producers videos anytime we put together a schedule and publish it for the team it instantly becomes obsolete because dates and how long someone takes on a task can change from day to day we may need a program on a task pulled off because we've got another blocker that he needs

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    to fix that may completely be completely unrelated to what he's working on yeah uh and because we are a a i w say a small office but we have a limited number of resources that makes how much time each developer spends on a particular project uh that much more valuable so being able to plot out that time is is is a very tricky thing to do it is and and how do you plan for that right always comes down to you've never done it before or the team's never done it before we've talked about this before you at the end of it just add you know 5 10% buffer right so I think it'll take two weeks I'm going to give you a little bit over two two and a half weeks and say that's our coverage um and so you'll tend to see that production bloat things a little bit more but that's usually to protect the team right you want to you

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    want to over Del you want to overd deliv right then is as opposed the other way around where people overpromise and so I think it's I think that's part of our job as production is to go well we're going to add a little bit extra time because even if we come down it'll deliver faster we'll be and then we'll know for the next time as well on top of that when let's say if I ask Mark Avent to you know finish a programming task and he gives me an estimate that it takes 5 days is that 5 days from now or 5 days worth of work that's right and that's something we have to consider as well what's on his plate what what resources he has at his disposal as well yeah and being alive plus development pre-production plus production you have to add in okay he's going to also fix a certain amount of bugs that week and so forth and so on so yeah it's a good question and it's it it does come down to you're doing a lot of guesstimating um and you have to trust the team I think the team usually knows the best or

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    if they've never done it before you just kind of add add a bonus and go yeah all right next one good question from argon BH this guy I love this guy does a lot of questions um it has already been mentioned that Sig is in process the process of trying to pool their human resources in the various studios around the world this puts more people with a similar set of skills and focus in the same place avoiding some of the natural roadblocks of working with people in different time zones um from a producer's perspective could you give any examples of how this organizational change has produce SC content more efficiently has this uh has this had affect has this affected the speed and quality at which the freelancer has been remodeled for instance that's a very specific I'm wondering why he asked this specific question so to answer you actually use a sound team as an example on this yeah uh yeah so this one is a good question I know a lot of people had

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    uh uh wanted to know more after Chris sent that email out to inform how this was going to work and I think this was a I I'm you know people like to read the the what it says and then oh what's between the lines and there was no real read between the lines on this one it was truly we're just looking at the business looking at the project and seeing what's best for us right to do it as fast as cheap as we can and which we're always doing right every day we're doing that every hour we're doing that so you're going to see changes and in normal game development in normal this happens you go through and you revamp the team you know my previous places I worked we revamped or reordered every year every six months like it it's pretty common because you you learn so much more like I know how to make that faster I don't need as many people or I need more people or whatever the case may be it's just it's the nature of business so how have we seen anything so

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    this is in the process of happening right now like we're talking about it because it just was announced and these things don't happen overnight um but we are moving quickly on them and so for instance one of the examples is we looked at we have our amazing audio team majority of them if not all of them except for one is out in the UK uh led by Lee banard and it's a fantastic team they deliver quality stuff and they're very quick turnarounds very quick and their communication solid and yada yada y all the things that make they're all in one location together and they're all in one place together and I think that was one of the things that you see you're like why are they doing so well it's like well they're all together they're all always together so when things come up they just turn and they get it fixed so they don't have to wait 24 hours for an email to come back so that's a lot of the things they're doing is just putting things in place place that makes sense like we're um we'll still have our multiple Studios cuz it

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    makes sense to have that um but we are unifying and I think that um we'll start I think we'll start seeing that the the knock on effects of that in the coming months right um freelancer one specifically um how you want to speak to that one I I've got nothing on that one I've got nothing on that one as well that's a great one we'll look into that one and come back to you next one comes from foyble that's a great f as producers I assume you play the role of project managers and therefore have a huge role in monitoring the developmental progress of the project at what point do you step in and determine that a person group or contractor is are having difficulty with their signed task and what actions have you taken to remedy the situation also are your teams comprised of individuals focused in specific tasks or most task done in small teams the leader Mentor for the less experienced members so this is kind of plays into key about uh what Eric was

17. 00:12:54

    just talking about how we're trying to centralize all of our resources in particular offices now our team hierarchy we have a a lead for each team for example we have a design lead we have an engineering lead we have an art lead so these leads pretty much head that team now when we create a task for someone these tasks are generated in collaboration with those team leads that way the lead is always aware of what their subordinates are working on and we as production can see an overall picture on what work needs to be done so the the kinds of tasks that get dictated To Us by the leads we look at let's say what features are coming coming down for the next patch uh we'll sit down with a design lead saying what what what do you need done for this so the design lead will give us a list of we need to have this in there we need to have that in there so we look at these features break

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    them down individual tasks and we start looking at which developers are free under that particular lead for example with art team if Ln says we need to have a concept or actually a hanger ready ship we see okay we see one of our artists Daniel he can do this Gage can do this Patrick can do this so us as production it's our job to kind of make granular on how these tasks are broken down yeah and and speak to that other question because I think that was a good for the last question the other question is um when somebody's having a difficulty right I think that's and I think you touched a little bit on it um talking to them that's a that's a great question and what actions have you taken anything everything right we've gone everywhere from evaluating maybe the task was incorrectly bid out maybe we said two days and it's like 3 months oh major mistake right we got to get with

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    our leads again maybe um they've had computer issues maybe we've pulled them away too much to do bugs for a live thing so they haven't got like we said on the last question I haven't got get to it maybe um it just isn't working with the structure so to the last question talking about shifting things around we've gone all the way from having full pipelines move to different locations because they had the staff for it right it wasn't necessarily somebody was failing they can't do their job get rid of them it was more okay this isn't working out here let's evaluate why oh it makes sense here because they have more people they have the right resources or maybe we realize there's one person here that needs to be a part of it the rest are in Frankfurt or vice versa and so it's I think it's more about again just constantly evaluating as we we look at our hiring practices we look who we bring in we look at our overall tasks and then we shift those responsibilities around which is one of

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    the cool things about having as I've called it before follow the sun development right we shut down UK opens up Frankfurt opens up Austin right vice versa they kind of keep things moving along so we can keep things going as fast as we can so so that's some of the things we've done and will continue to do okay all right mask all right from mask what are the challenges that come with staff changes in different compartments what are the challenges you face when changing producers do you need to reassign certain responsibilities do you share all responsibilities and have similar knowledge information about current tasks or is it split between you how do you effectively share information with others without overwhelming them with ir relevant information do you find it difficult to exchange information with other Studios due to culture or language barriers if the buck knife breaks while defending yourselves due to poor worksmanship how do you punish the

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    employee you assign to make it that's a lot of fantastic questions we stab them with the stump of the buck knife there you go uh a lot of those could be answered in different portions I think that's like four or five different questions the first one I think to speak to for sure is staff changes production changes responsibilities sharing knowledge um the work still needs to get done yeah so we um we in this industry in many industries of creativity uh people move around right it's very common place people get another job they get a promotion they change their spouse needs to move to another country their their kids need to go to another school there's all kinds of reasons people come and go it's a it's a pretty fluid thing it's just business right any company any industry has this this is not new um so for us it's about building contingency plans

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    and understanding who can own what in the current environment so as somebody shifts out there's by no means ever an expectation that every producer needs to know everything there's no way we could all do that at the number of production we have in this company alone it's it would be it would be an overwhelming amount so yes we do break it down by responsibilities we do try to say all right Daren you're going to work with the engineering and design team here in Santa Monica you're going to also work on live releases you're also going to do XY andz right that's what you're going to try to own you will likely be involved in these three things and you may hear about this stuff because it's in your studio so you should be aware of it but by no means these requireed at all um in fact we have to trust each other so yes when someone says hey I got another great job my wife needs to move to this my husband this right whatever we go cool let's here's the contingency

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    plan and we start to either shift out that work look at what we may need to rehire right looking it's it's kind of the part of going the last question about reevaluating the business needs um and then we can filter that out so if it makes sense to go okay that chunk of work that person was owning we can probably still cover that here for a short period of time until we get support we'll do this this and this and we'll fan it out um but But ultimately we'll have a longer term plan of okay the the job thing will go up on the website or we're going to promote this person we're going to give them these responsibilities so we always come up with a contingency plan and then we generally have a contingency plan on back of that but we also you know you may have heard this before the hit by the bus plan as as vulgar as that sounds and how much I hate that because I don't want anyone to ever get hit by a bus the idea is that or hopefully something more positive happened um would we still be able to function yes right we want to make sure that people are they

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    understand enough of what everyone's working on so we can step into help whenever possible I mean it's it's always a good sign of good management practic is that the company doesn't fall apart I mean if if you're someone who's so Central to everything that if you can't leave for a day without thing things falling apart yeah uh that highlights a lot of inefficiencies that management practice you should be able to step away for weeks on them because as a manager as a product manager or producer uh we should have everybody should have an understanding what they're doing that if I step away those things continue to on my Clockwork yes that's right so there's some other questions in here um there's a good one about difficult exchanging information with cultureal barriers that's a great question in fact these are two good guys to talk about it we were for in our previous Place expected to work in China for many months to set certain things up certain operations um and that was kind of I for me personally I know I've

25. 00:19:16

    traveled but that was my first on the business side dealing with cultural barriers and so yeah absolutely you work with anyone that's not within 50 miles of yourself there are cultural barriers right whether it's the phrases you use or the the terminology you use in an email or or uh knock on effects I just use that in this thing but that's apparently a very largely thing use in the UK don't use that here at all right um there was also someone referenced soccer I'm sorry football and and how we should do something and I'm like I don't understand that I don't what you use basketball terms or something else or they call you know take out food or to go is takeway that's right yeah so there and those are obviously silly examples but there definitely are on the business side questions where you you do have you may have that little added element of like well what does that mean or how do we really do that or how you know um it's not as bad with other english- speaking cultures right right um and I know like our Frankfurt office those

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    guys you know they all are very fluent in English and it's it works pretty well but um definitely challenges it also helps that we have our guys going back and forth being officers like we've had our UK producer Ricky jutley out here we've had a few of their designers out here and you know we've sent a few of our guys out there so there is kind of a cultural exchange that goes on and it keeps the company much more I homogenized and unified in how we view things totally yeah that is absolutely right so the last question on here uh about how do you punish an employee who assigned to make it have they not seen my lead pipe of project scheduling yeah that's a yes yes you have uh that's a good question it's not always as simple as that poor workmanship isn't always that one person failed at one thing this is a team effort it's always a team effort um and so we want to look at it that way we do like to find where a

27. 00:20:51

    problem is at the root and fix it for sure but we don't want to we don't run around going oh this is wrong you did it right it's blame games don't help anyone right they don't help in a family they don't help in a business they don't help in the team it just creates animosity and toxicity and it's a knej yourk reaction just instantly want to point your finger like it's their fault that's right so it's more about understanding what the problem was going to the root of it and then going let's figure out how to solve that problem um on a mass scale as opposed to just you know if somebody is a problem obviously you take the correct business steps for that that's not necessarily what this conversation is about but there are there are things you want to fix so you want to find the root cause and fix them yep yeah communicating expectations book Eric has that's is you're communicating making sure that you're clearly communicating because if they don't you know maybe the expectations weren't clearly communicated and then by

28. 00:21:38

    clearly communicating expectations that is the step to you know because then if they fail again you're like hey we set these expectations what happened so C gu is yours number seven because there were two questions that were very related to one another between Cav guy and crazy person so we've kind of merged them into a kind of a portmanto of just one big question so it's how do you guys manage the challenge of multiple development streams going on at the same time for example the team was pushing out daily updates to the PTU 1.3 ausome job by the way thank you there's the sale there's the still just gave you thumbs up while I'm sure others still While others are still heads down trying to get the baby PE up and running soon trademark and to add on to that crazy person said we've been

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    told the 1.3 is the merging of all development streams into one this makes me think that 1.3 is actually kind of huge in the way things of of things running smoother could you spend a few minutes describe the sort of impact merging the stream H streams has on the development process and how Better or Worse does it make for your job um so I definitely want you to answer the question but I there's a part in there I wanted to just chime in on about the it's kind of a huge in the way things run smoother absolutely um having everything condensed into one place means globally as a company we're looking at the same information the same data and we're all working in the same place like we just merged a stream back that we were working on the whip side and it it did make some people not excited that it broke a few things but it got us all looking at the same thing again and so when we brought all those streams back together a while ago that you guys might have heard of that was definitely the step in the right direction and so now we wait till the last minute right when we're about to

30. 00:23:14

    release and we break that off and we give that to you guys and then we merge all that back and so we just try to maintain this one core set of development so that we can all work together we can all speak of the same language that and we always try to keep an emphasis on stability and I don't know if you guys noticed but the still bit stability of the systems have been much improved as of late since we've been doing this so as far as how do we manage the challenge of mult uh multiple development streams going at the same time well that's what we have the different teams for we may have one person working on one stream another person is working on a much more public facing Stream So and this also comes down to good QA as well for example the QA team may report a bug in the 1.3 stream and we may ask them to go back and test it see if it's happening in our main development stream as well just to see because whatever we it may be

31. 00:24:02

    happening in the 1.3 stream it may not be happening in the main development stream so because in development stream whatever code changes may have fixed it already so it's kind of being cognitive about what the differences between streams are what's going on in each one uh this is where you know being able to track product milestones and the fixed versions in our task management program jira comes in very very useful so we do have a way of reporting in fact we have our daily dashboard that shows how many bugs and we have open for this stream how many open for this stream are they blockers are they critical are they trivial and we have daily conversation with the production staff globally about what bugs and what tasks need to be tackled before the day is over yeah and You' mentioned how better or worse it makes your job it's definitely better and how we're maintaining it is even as people work in the 1.3 stream that you guys are seeing um we're immediately we have an automation process um that we're

32. 00:24:51

    immediately grabbing that data and trying to bring it back into our mainstream at all times now before it wasn't we didn't even have that operation running so that's been wonderful so that when we are done with 13 we're we're right back we're right back all working together and we can Lop off again for a new stream without going oh hold on stop everything we got to merge everything back now and it becomes this big orchestrated process so it's a it's a little you know we get those emails constantly like hey this we're blocked somebody needs to help out get this done but it's better to be able to do it a little bit at a time yes right it's like if you're writing a book or you're painting a painting it's every day you spend a little time on it right by the time you're done it'll all be pretty rather than trying to paint the entire picture in one go that's right that's right and then the other part of that question was how do you manage challenge of multiple streams at the same time I already said that one I think you already said that so cut out everything I just said from when I started talking to right now Justin we just put this the headline

33. 00:25:40

    for this in this week's episode 10 for the producers Daren and Eric discussed the pros and cons of Crossing streen there it is nice I like that I like that that down that's perfect I will ask him if they probably won't they won't uh but just just then use a word for Ghostbusters you'll be fine yeah just make sure they don't think converted next question the tick so we're again merged two questions here from the tick and from delarian Delan Delon Delon yeah there's no I in that delarian that's what how I say like delirium and Darian yeah there you go it's you're you're swaying my verbs all right what is done when a component becomes too complex or cumbersome to be useful in the game would it be dialed back or scrap and start a new uh and then the other part of the question is hey fellas thanks for taking time time to answer the questions

34. 00:26:28

    our pleasure what are some of the characteristic methods you utilize to take a a task done on time to get a test done in time excuse me how do you balance positive feedback with critical critiques and what are hard lines you draw for yourselves in the teams you produce so on the first one as far as like what if a common becomes too complex or cumbersome uh this actually ties back to that Skype conversation I had with Stephen humph regarding energy token system one of the things we talked about is that anytime a designer use the flow graph system or using flow graph as a designer it pings the network and the more times you use photograph to Ping the network that's going to cause more and more bandwidth problems so one of the things we want to do is look at is using flow graph the most effective way of doing this design feature on the ship so from that that

35. 00:27:15

    becomes a conversation between designers would they rather just hardcoded would they rather use flow graph or use the entity tokens through flow graph so these are things that are planned out in advance but there is some research and development that goes into it and we do some Concepts some proof of concept some prototyping to see which one works better yeah yeah and to speak to the next question about the character and car character carrot and stick methods um I don't personally believe in carrot and stick um because if you ever see the old adage of carrot and stick you generally means whatever it is you're pushing forward with this carrot is going to get tired at some point right because they're never achieving that goal um it's more about making something attainable it's more about working alongside their leads it's more about constant and consistent daily motivation it's not about sticking something out there and going all right let's go get it if you don't get it you're going to get hit that's right that's never

36. 00:28:03

    getting anything done and we work in a very creative environment we're making video games we're making experiences we're making entertainment we're not building a a cog we're not building a car we're not building something that's been proven we're you know we're making stuff up as we go along so it's it needs a little bit more personal I think more finesse than a carot stick I think that's abut used in very old production processes at production facilities um and I and it just it doesn't work in this environment yeah and and I think it's largely true of a lot of game studos where production ruling with an iron fist is just an Antiquated model that largely doesn't work that much because you have so many people who have valuable voices to add to the content to the development of the game uh it's it's much more collaborative effort there's no single moment where production says this is what we need to have this is what you're going to be working on and absolutely nothing else so we we have a

37. 00:28:50

    lot of sit down discussions as we mentioned before with our uh International colleagues we also do daily stand-ups with the development teams see where they are on every task what roadblocks do they have where are they at uh what do they need do we need do do anything for them to help them get their job done yeah and and to use the cartic method generally means the person that's doing it you have to force them to do something they hate you have to and we don't want to use coercion and and here everybody's excited to work on this the passion drives all of us to work hard every day every second we're at our desk and if you get distracted that happens but that generally isn't needs some sort of forceful Med you know motivation at all um us people are distracted by something else cool in the game yeah that's right look what this does isn't this cool for sure um and then the B balancing positive feedback with critical critiques and hard lines

38. 00:29:41

    um it you want how to balance them you just want them both right you don't want everything to be negative and and constantly down even though in this environment we're always trying to make things better so we're always looking at things partially with a negative eye so I think it is we need to motivate you know what what's good about it what what SU successful what how did that go well right that like let's say that last release we all want to pick it apart and say how horrible it is right we agree with what you're saying we read the forums and redid we like yeah this is horrible and that's stupid and this sucked but we do have to go well but we succeeded here here and here and everybody loved it awesome okay let's keep building on top of that while fixing the bad things so it's just it's I think it's easier for us we're all in that critical mindset to make things better and then there are something where we do have to put a a Hardline foot down and say no we cannot include this in this build I know you love it I know I know it's something that you really really want to see FL out but we

39. 00:30:28

    just don't have the resources or the time to do it I mean if if we can get it up for the next patch awesome but we'd like to see some more testing some more tweaking some more balancing on and definitely some more input from whether it's our QA team or development team or the big man CR himself that's right y absolutely so this is from Sha Ridley how much of your work is focused on stuff we won't see for many months or longer compared to stuff that goes from concept to delivery very quickly are we seeing the bleeding edge or is it mostly polished but old content to you what is the project management style meaning waterfall some flavor of agile or something else uh you often mention the use of sharp pointy implements when talking about hurting the team is the work environment more Mad Max or Jurassic Park that's awesome that's awesome so just for clarification if we ever joke about you know having to prod the team

40. 00:31:18

    into shape it please understand it's always mentioned in just very rarely do we ever need to know cajo them or coers them into doing something I think it's because they know we have a sword hanging on my desk I don't need to do that to begin with um but but it is an interesting question because a lot of the stuff that we work on is planned up months in advance however a lot of times during let's say we're working on a deadline torn citizen con we're still plugging away in a lot of things just even to the 11th hour so there may be features that we've been trying to fix trying to get into the game we may not see it till like a day or two before or we only see one aspect of that of that project and we won't see the completed finalized thing until it's revealed at the event because we're only working on one one facet of it so being

41. 00:32:07

    able to see it in completion and see the you know complete fruition of all our works we see it on the live stream when you guys see it y it's kind of like guess when you know you have an actor working on a film they only does their they only do their line so they don't see the final film until like a private screening or something yeah so this is very similar we won't see the entire finished product until either we get to see it just days in F or during the live stream and that's why when you see videos of us watching the live stream we're cheering along with you guys because we're this is awesome we get to see what we've been working on for the last two three months we keep our heads down and it's it's hard to see the whole thing all the time with how big we are it is a bit of both we do have a master schedule that has everything laid out and we're constantly feeding into that and we the stuff we're showing you because of the the environment that we're in we're showing you the stuff as much as we can as often as we can right so like unless it's like a big reveal of

42. 00:32:56

    something we want to show off to you guys like we did Bishop speech we might hold that a little bit tighter because we really want to make it cool to get you guys excited but for the most part we're just trying to show everything we possibly have all the time um but we do have a larger term schedule that we're feeding into and we're delivering things as much as we possibly can as often as we can that feed into that because everything you're seeing is still building that large Universe right and that's kind of why Chris orig built this out in the beginning as modules so we can show you here the pieces that make it and that's exactly what we're doing and I mean they see even on like around the verse the art sneak peeks and stuff like that so they may see that piece of art or concept artwork so knowing that th those concepts are being kind of previewed we're still working on facets of that of that that ship or that terrain or whatever is that we're previewing so by the time it's actually released to the

43. 00:33:44

    Hang or to into Arena Commander or whenever we work on Star Citizen uh persistent universe that is the culmination of months worth of work but you've been kind of seeing the progress all along cuz we we do like to share that transparency with everyone yep exactly as far as project management methodologies yeah we we've kind we get this question a lot and it's it's pretty agile I guess it's it's pretty agile um it's not hardcore 100% but I think we follow more agile but at the same time we also take a lot from waterfall right because we do have this large thing we're trying to deliver and we have separate milestones for each of those and um they're kind of living within each other because agile is the more micro deliveries within the larger mileston I'm I'm going to use my brother's project methodology it's the dit system okay do whatever it takes there you go the get her done DWI do whatever it takes now as far as madmax or Jurassic Park um I'm going to photoshop a picture of Eric on Chris

44. 00:34:33

    Pratt's face in from Jurassic world I'm going to put the different designers and as the Velociraptor faces when he's in the pit kind of all standing like this that's uh that's a tough question because it's it's I don't know you may have heard it's like hurting cats right you have people that are very passionate and know that when they got to get done but keeping them all together is is a challenge uh but a good challenge all right last question uh okay or the goofy water here all right he says bonu says okay I'll try a more serious question I'm a programmer that works on bespoke business apps and I use jir at work how do you guys use jira is it the quote unquote source of Truth for tracking what people are working on and how completely they feel it is what's assigned to them but unstarted Etc have you modified the workflow and statuses to better represent the ship pipeline

45. 00:35:20

    for example or is it all spreadsheets question mark smiley face if it's not in jira it doesn't exist that's right well hold on the rest of the question it's on a different page well I'd love to hear about this I can see where showing screenshots like card walls would be great helping in helping explaining but perhaps more info than we can handle you already said it if it's not in jir doesn't exist that is definitely a methodology that we are um not only adopting but utilizing more and more every day jir is definitely becoming one of our main production tools and we're trying to encourage people to keep the statuses up to dat because it does help communicate cross studio um what the status is when things are being delivered and how much work we have left right when you you if youve ever done any kind of project management you know if you can build your backlog as realistic and real and and and thorough and with good bids the better because

46. 00:36:07

    you can now go okay it'll take me an hour to sit down and tell you exactly how long this is going to take to get done now that usually is that like Daren said at the beginning when you start off with that it's usually when you go into battle the moment you start the project it all changes and you kind of keep it up to date but at least when you start with it you can start getting estimates you can see how long things are going to take you can see the resources you need we are kind of the start of that with our leads our Le our leads go we get our vision the leads break it down the producers put all that together we look at what that means for us and then we get the realities together and I and I think jir the point of jir is to collect all that information as much as you can so when you look at something like 130 and we want to deliver it we constantly are looking at what's left what's the big blockers what's trivial what what really won't break anything what will keep things moving and we can make quick decisions faster can we bump it to the next version you got it and and so forth and so on so yeah jir if it doesn't it's

47. 00:36:56

    not in jir doesn't exist it's kind of on our Mantra and we're and we're doing our best to to maintain that as our database it also helps with accountability for example if someone starts working on a task that isn't a jir how do we account for how much time we spent on it is it a feature that we actually needed in the first place yeah so by having everybody working through jira on specific tasks we we create a a paper trail of what's been worked down how long people spent on it how long it's taken how long how much time is left to complete it so it gives the production team road map that we can provide that information whether it's to you guys on how soon we're going to be Pres presing something it lets us tell the other teams here's where we're at where are you guys okay cool let's work together on this and let's see what we can come up with absolutely and any kind of production tracking tool has been it's it's only as good as the people that use it and it's only as good as people that keep it up to date so if

48. 00:37:43

    the goal for someone to say hey what is KX working on we can say what does it say in J they can search oh he's working on this it says in progress is that right yep great right not only have you sped up communication you've made it efficient for somebody to go oh kex can't work on that because he has this this and this or we can say that's not the priority anymore we're shifting to this because of a certain release and it makes us make decisions quicker or you know if Zay suddenly decid one day I'm going to make a 3D environment for the you know Capital class ship HUD system and that's not on his task list we see him working on that we're like Zan I we we know we're getting close to deadline here let's let's that's really awesome let's get that into the schedule but right now our crunch time because we have this this this this this is what we this is what the needs of the project are right now that's right yep now as far as what workflows we've modified and it's all spreadsheets I spend a lot of

49. 00:38:32

    time in Excel I'm an Excel guy I I love using Excel yep I don't and I don't think you ever get out of excel Excel is a great tool for scenario building and planning and it's it's you can move things around quicker until you have all the data you can make more assumptions in Excel than you can with jir jir needs actual data yes and we've been playing around with Microsoft Project yep shotgun yep a lot of a lot of good production tools that that are all kind of working together so all right well I think that's it another bunch of great questions thank you guys so much for these questions I'm I'm really excited to hopefully do another of these from you guys if we missed anything please continue to feel continue to submit questions through the forums send them to us any way you want so we'll keep talk to us on Twitter anything anything and everything we we love interacting with you guys and again we just want to thank the subscribers for making this possible um we could do this without you guys so uh thanks for everything um

50. 00:39:19

    again I'm Eric I'm Darien we'll see you next time hey guys thanks for watching um temp for the chairman uh if you guys would like to uh 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 uh if you guys would like to watch episodes around the verse go here please and I will see you in the verse [Applause]