10 for the Producers: Episode 08 (2015.06.22)

22 June 201500:41:561,301 linesWatch on YouTube ↗

Transcript — every row opens the video at that moment

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[Music] hi everybody and welcome back to another episode of 10 for the producers I'm Travis day and I'm joined today uh Eric Kiren Davis Mr Davis I just want to take a moment to say thank you to all of our subscribers out there it's your extra contributions that make shows like this possible and we really appreciate the opportunity to come here and answer your direct questions um so thank you for that and thank you to all the out there who have backed so without further Ado shall we shall we Dive Right In you want to go first first okay you start the way let's do this we've got bejor Schwarz asks do you think development of Star Citizen will become more stable parenthetical better to predict the timeline after the FPS instancing large world and AC 2.0 are finished or will
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there be a lot of friction when all of this is integrated how do you balance this problem of integrating new features and stable predictable development between the main development branch and our live / PTU Branch so that's a good question and uh and actually you know high five we got our first like producer relevant question on the show that's um yeah so to answer your question really some of the things you highlight in here are things like FPS instancing particularly large world and what we're really talking about when we talk about those things are new features and they're definitely for the cry Engen at least uh new R&D features so they require a lot of work from the programming team and there's a end goal of what they want to achieve that's kind of set out from the beginning but the rout route there is not immediately clear from the very beginning so it's something that you kind of discover as you go so one of the things that you'll see is that those features are far less predictable they
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have a a lower predictability quotient if I coin a term so yes that does increase uh our inability to predict the timelines on these things and then it you know Cascades into other things of well if something relies on large world and we don't quite know when that's going to be then we don't quite know when the dependent thing is going to be and it all as you as you get close and closer it all becomes more clear and it's kind of our job is to maintain and update and maintain and update and keep a clearer picture as we can in any given time but yeah so to answer the the specific question of how do you know will this improve the the predictability once these things are done the answer is as we get closer and closer to the end of the project and there's less and less R&D and less and less new feature work and more just content pushing that becomes infinitely more predictable
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content is something that is much you know with the exception of like design content but I'm talking like raw art assets or we need to make these these levels I mean that's much more easy to waterfall and it's far less uh unknown so yeah that will get much more predictable and much more quick as the project picks up and we're kind of hitting I would say at this point we're around the knee of the curve when we're going to start doing more just straight content production and and cut down on the feature production um so I hope that answers your question and thank you it was a good one yeah good question good segue predictability uh uh JM asks when working on timelines how do you account for the unexpected I imagine game de development timelines have had uh would have lots of interconnected dependencies and a delay in one track of work might hold up another track do you just build in extra
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time for the inevitable issues that will come up question are and then second question is are certain tracks of work more predictable than others fantastic question uh and a good producer question as well yes I would say you know what this comes down to is the more comfortable you are with the uh team and the decision makers of your team um will help kind of guide this so for me for scheduling a big part is to try to capture as much as I possibly can right so it is one thing to just say you know you talk to an artist or a developer and you say how much time is X going to take and they'll say five days you go great five days throw that in there but there's some things that kind of go around that like does that 5 days include just work death time no meetings cranking through work does that include iteration with your lead with your
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supervisor with the you know your entire that's right um Does it include you know any other kind of buffers we might need any other independent connections um and if that's the case then yes that's the five days that I schedule and then we can schedule the whole thing out that way we can say if we understand our our mass amount of work like you said when we're not necessarily rding and we're kind of in predictability um as much as that word isn't a real thing it's it's thing we try to use uh you can get a little bit better understanding so once you understand your team once you understand the decision maker process once you understand the dynamic and the dichotomy of your group um this becomes a little bit better I think the quote goes a battle plan goes out the wind window after the first shot is fired first contact with the Enemy yeah yeah so you know every plan does go out the window and as producers our job is to
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iterate with that plan with those ideas um and predictability is definitely a word that we don't get to enjoy much in game development and in any I think entertainment creation like when you're trying I mean we're not necess doing something new but when you're trying to do stuff new stuff you don't necess have a business model to follow yeah even if it's just new for the team new for the people doing it um and actually I think one of the things you said is a really important point to make that you know a lot of people I think have the impression that oh you know you you sit down at the beginning of a project you lay out your budget for the entirety of the project you lay out the schedule and then you just sit and you track against that and your iory Tower somewhere you kind of survey the battle just sit there and watch it's much more like uh I World War II Sergeant throwing grenade at the front line and you know that kind of a thing it's it's much more moment to moment so I think yeah for sure you know um as much as I think we want to be
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predictable as producers are and scheduling and budgeting and um it's it's just it's very hard to account for that so it's it's a lot of it's a lot of work and a lot of ination a lot of communication and a lot a lot of of understanding how the plan can move right so once you understand all the players that are involved you can you know once I started doing schedules on projects on things I've done in the past I've done it a few times or I've worked with the same group multiple times that helps a tremendous amount like I know Tim always does this and Ashley always does this and Fred always does this and I know some of their quirks um great quirks that make them awesome at their job and it helps me kind of plan better as producer so uh I hope that answered your question that's a great question so right on to the next one so man these are like all on point today okay so coming from n is it possible to give an example of how long each aspect
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of a feature or asset takes for example what percentage of time is spent in concept design coding polish does each asset SL feature follow a similar breakdown or are there more resource heavy in certain areas if so are there any indicators to each asset taking longer at a certain phase so this is a good one I think uh well one one of the things first off is no they're all going to be different right that's uh every feature is its own unique special snowflake um generally you could categorize them and say okay you know ships for example ships will probably if it's this ship or that ship will probably spend commensurate ratios of time in each step of the pipeline if it's this radar system versus this missile system yeah gets a little more nebulous um so I guess I think a ship would be a good one to break down to
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answer his question so what percentage of time is spent in concept of the totality of a ship I would say probably 20% to 25% does that sound about right yeah and you know concept to speak to concept I think that's a place place we want to spend a large amount of our time right we get all of our designers questions answered our gameplay groups questions answered our art leadership's questions answered it's the cheaper portion essentially of the Cod creation process no that's that's a really valid point because it's uh it can be viewed in the same way as pre-production for the entirety of the game it's where you get everything out of the way so that everybody else can just execute without having to stop and go oh well what about what if the bike needs a bike chain and you yeah exactly uh so yeah 20 2025 I think that's good and then the design side is kind of well Design's kind of wrapped into that let's call it yeah 25 to 30% for concept design animation
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review all that happens during that phase the coding side you know in this case I would say modeling uh for the ship and that would probably be about 70% of your time yeah that's the line share and you want to spend a lot a lot there right you want to that's the look that's the feel that's how it's going to be it's going to work in engine that's everything right yep and then you know audio bfx last 5% now very important part but definitely yeah this actually one thing uh in production that always tends to happen and uh is something to always keep aware of and try to combat if you ever want to be a producer is the effects and audio are the oft forgotten but very important last step in every process yeah yes as as go back to the predictability part of this question as things you hope won't push but as things might push in different aspects there has to be an end date somewhere and so a
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lot of times that end dat doesn't move and everything just kind of gets crammed down and and you can talk to our audio team and our team they're like yeah they kind of plan on it which you don't want you want them to have the the ability to be as creative and make the coolest thing possible too so if some of the ways we've kind of combed that is we get them involved as early as we can like maybe back in concept like just start thinking about how this ship might sound or think about how this character right look at what the moving parts will be yeah exactly when he gets animation totally all right you're up next one oh yeah okay all right next one all right uh next question from tac buzz killer three Z's one of those is capitalized nice fantastic when it comes time to staff a project how cost effective is it to Outsource versus hire a new team member and how is that decision made this the record I really like this question because this is like a debate
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in the industry as well yeah yeah yeah for for me uh a lot of times it just comes down to um how much time do you have for the project how much money do you have for the project uh when does the project need to be out and then those will obiously obviously guide the quality of the project but once you understand at least one of those three or as many of those three as you can uh it helps you make a better decision right so you take into consideration um hiring people locally versus hiring people regionally or nationally um you look at um if if it's a if you're just you know like for games or for a lot of things in pre-production it's a big ramp up you're building a lot at the beginning but you're not necessarily at the end so it does Mak make sense to staff up but it doesn't make sense to staff up for permanent staff forever not necessarily um so I think the idea is
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try to get as many people in the game industry jobs and to keep us all employed and have a great time making great games but the realities do come down to how do we make this for the best price possible but hit that quality bar we really want yeah and and Outsourcing I do think it gets kind of a bad wrap in our industry CU it's like oh they took our jobs or oh it means lower quality and actually there's a lot of super talented people out there that do Outsourcing work so it doesn't necessarily mean lower quality and the The Taking of the jobs thing is the other one that I wanted to address too which is if you have a guy like Chris Smith right Chris Smith lead florist make some beautiful ships made a lot of the beautiful ships that we have in the game to ask him to make 34 variations of boxes barrels and potted plants yeah is you know maybe to him maybe he'd dig it I don't know I'm not going to speak for Chris but yeah it would be a misuse of
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his talent right uh because you can't get anybody to make one of the ships that he makes but you can get a lot of different people that can make those potted plants or those boxes and for me giving somebody with uh more of a junior just getting in the industry an opportunity to work in a game for it gives them of how does PL into the how do they fit in the Master System yeah out of scho or just looking for a job or something need some work absolutely um so yeah we you know trying to balance giving as many jobs as we can but also the realistic goals of the project without getting this ballooned you know anything budget or schedule right it's well then then that's another thing that a lot of Studios struggle with I mean in this industry you have generally like for the longest time it was just feast or famine right so you get up you ramp up up up up up up and then then you finally have enough team to ship the product and then quarter to everybody gets laid off cuz you can't
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sustain that yeah and then there was the popular idea that oh we'll have two time teams simultaneously to studio so when one Project's in pre-production the other Project's in full-blown production we've rolled most of Team two on the team one y and then once team one ships then everybody will roll over to team two and then we'll do pre-production on team one and that one actually worked for quite a while and that has gone better I think but you know one of the things that Outsourcing allows us to do and it's actually been really important to Chris is that you want everybody that you hire to know that you've made a commitment to them like the company has made a commitment to them to take care of them to nurture them to grow them in their professional career and in exchange we get this beautiful art we get beautiful code whatever it is that that transaction is um and you want to be able to have people have security and trust and faith in the job and so Outsourcing is a tool that you can use to scale without risking uh not being
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able to make good on that contract yeah I think to talk to Outsourcing for a second longer is when we say outsourc so we don't just mean taking jobs away from people local or whatever word you want to use cuz you usually I think that gets negatively branded some the outsources we use our local some local they're just called outsourcers because they're not necessarily in in house yeah know but like guys like The Ether you got it there's full teams out there that work with multiple Studios so you have they hire on artists or programmers or whatever it is and then they work with companies like us to to build their games and it's actually a very uh large industry a lot of people are getting jobs because that Outsourcing opportunity so yeah no and they I mean and that's the the other thing thing to point out is their entire business model is predicated on they make a social contract with their guy who would maybe be a freelancer otherwise which is really feas or famine and unstable and he gets a regular full-time job and they're going out and they're hunting for work basically getting 20 projects
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at once and that's how they maintain their company stability so it's a it's an interesting ecosystem you know what's funny I never realized how much of like a business/ production nerd I was until we started getting like these kinds of questions that really I don't know get the they get me super excited yeah exced about so the decision made is generally kind of go back to your original question it's just we look at all those factors and then whatever makes sense for the project the time cuz no project is the same even when you're making you know to throw an out Madden 25 right there's still there may be some kind of formula but it's still a new project still new tech still new artists new players on the field like there's still new stuff to it so it just all depends on the project they got to be horrible they got to remake those jerseys every time new pipeline yeah horrible horrible or you know fun if you love jerseys yeah yeah I just like to think that somewhere
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out there is a guy who did nothing but make hub caps for GTA is and he loves it full-time job is making real hub caps parttime job is virtual ones and on the weekends he installs hub caps on his car I love it all right our next question comes to us from Amanti when delays occur in the production stream such as what's happened with starmarine what are the producers at cig doing to minimize its effect on the overall schedule of the game's development I'm aware that various modules are being run in parallel to help off offset this but Are there specific things that are being done that we may not be aware of so this is actually a really good question for uh Sean Tracy Sean Tracy Jeremy masker uh these are guys that I'm constantly having discussions with sometimes arguments with about what is the best way to offset and minimize the just basically
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mitigate the risk that this will delay other streams healthy healthy argument no and we do we have healthy arguments where it's uh you know I think that's another thing that's important in production is you have to be super open to my idea is not always the best idea and everybody needs to be that way in game development in general and it's kind of the to to borrow a term from our old friends at Activision it's the battle for the best idea and it really is true like it's it's I love having those conversations because you know you may think you're right but then you get into it and okay that's a better solution anyways back to your question uh the real point of this is yes what we do is we have the interesting stream and Branch structure so you talk about main is like the main code stream and actually that's really no longer the case for us uh we do most of our main development in well what can best be described as two pyramids one an inverted pyramid like this and the other
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one a regular pyramid Down Below in the middle sits Maine down below that we have Game Dev so we have Game Dev FPS Game Dev AC Game Dev social Game Dev and that's where each of the teams Works in their own little discrete area now there's a bunch of intermediate streams that are constantly synchronizing with one another and what this does is if two guys and two different streams work on the same file it will push into here they'll integrate with one another they'll send an email to both of them saying resolve this make sure this comes together in a clean way and everything that's clean stable and beautiful theoretically then propagates up to Maine and then it's from Maine that we'll Branch out to do a release so the point that we get to this upper part of the pyramid is when we say hey we want to release starmarine which we have said we want to release star Marine because we do so we then create a branch above
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that that is the star Marine release branch and this is what will end up going to public so that is created off of Main which theoretically with the system that's going on down here in this ecosystem is Main's pretty stable and then we do final polish bug fixing and much toan's Chagrin maybe some feature development in that release stream which is then later backwards once we release backwards integrated down through the whole tree structure again so this is the I guess the technical structure of how we've arade our perforce to try and mitigate the impact that one release has on another but then there are also you know kind of call them social psychological or marketing impact um that it does have where you want to try and space out your releases a little bit to give a release time to breathe to give the team focus and time to focus on that release and make sure that it they support it after its release and everything else so in that way you do
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want to kind of space out your releases a little bit or else you're going to burn everybody on the team out and divide the focus so I don't know you have anything to add on that or oh master of that one that was great yeah I don't have anything to add I I think that it's um the the what we try to mitigate is is any any individual module impacting the other module negatively I think that's really what we're talking about and and we so as producers we are trying to find ways as Travis has done excellently over the years of trying to find ways to you know how can we keep pushing down this module so we can you know not impact each other so yeah and and actually that's a really good point too that you make which is it does happen yeah right and we're just trying to minimize so a lot of a lot of things in production are I can't promise it's not going to happen but we can try to minimize it happening and minimize the impact that it happening has and having as many plans in our back pockets as we
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can right like here's the plan we're all shooting for but here's our other 10 plans we have in the back pocket and things you got it that we'll have in the back of our heads are part of our schedules for sure thank you good question yeah great okay M my next um all right noo 1977 you say Nostromo or Nostromo what do you say let me see Nostromo Nostromo okay Nostromo Nostromo 1977 all right as a senior producer what is the most difficult as aspect of the job managing people SL time hitting schedule Milestones schedule Milestones facilitating communication or staying within budget yes yeah well balancing all yeah I think the hardest thing for me I apologize jump in is is is how dare you um is balancing all of those that's
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the hardest thing right I don't think any one of those specifically is harder than the other each of them take different types of skills right so working alongside people leading them helping inspire them to get do great work that takes a lot more soft skills right so it depends on your ability as a producer and what your you know we have as I I talked about this in the around the verse a couple of week ago or so was there are different kinds of senior producers right we all we everybody has complimentary hopefully skill sets that help each other work together make make a great team um and so some people are really focused on the soft skills and the and just helping unify a team and building that communication Hub that just you know syncs together um some are more technical some love to schedules like we all kind of have synchronous synchronistic skills I think yeah no and that's actually I mean I think you and I actually kind of exemplify that relationship where I am eh at scheduling
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like as far as things go it's it's my it's not my strongest suit right and I think you're really strong at scheduling and the youel on that side we both I would say have actually pretty good soft skills and we're commer in that and then your focus is much more heavily on the the art and the scheduling and the pipeline side and I think you know that really well and my focus probably more on the technical and the design side I think that's why we're a good yeah I agree and and so it I don't think one will be harder than the other for each say of us if we use examples I think it just depends on what your your core strengths are um and then helping finding the people in your team to help round out those skills so we can all kind of get this thing done and and because I think they uh Noom will pointed out some great points that those are the main things we're looking at as producers right those are the main main core items and trying to do trying to come in under
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budget with a a a fantastically greatly working team that communicates awesome that we're hitting as many musles as we can to get out the best possible experience we can that's our goal and so we have to look at all those different going back to what you said pillars right of of producing so yeah um so I think that's just I think balancing is the harder part for sure yeah no I think that is the most difficult it's uh it's a juggling act I don't know how many times I've used that analogy but it's like plate spinning juggling it's all that yeah great question thank you all right so our next question comes to us from logical chimp how much of planning is a science that is calculable and how much is gut instinct and how do you work out the reliability SL accuracy of a Dev estimate for implementing a feature I actually first part I'll answer the last part of the question first which is every developer is super
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different yeah um and it's actually as a producer it is difficult to get accurate estimates out of people until you know them so the more time that you spend with them and the more you can go like okay so 4 hours for him really means two or four hours for him really means eight and it's not like one slower or faster it's literally just the way they think about how long it'll take yeah we talked about this I think on jmx's question right the better you understand that your team the easier it becomes right these teams that work together for years and years and years and years you know exactly what they mean or or they you don't even have to do it right A lot of times I would get to a sense after working with a certain team for a certain amount of time that I could pre-fill a lot of their bids obviously we talked to them afterward to make sure they're accurate but you know yeah I know it usually takes you know Jennifer three weeks for that I you takes right I think that's uh there is a science to it
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and that science is understanding your team and and then also understanding the project we're working on yeah and knowing what the technical details of what they're doing so you know yeah we got to a point I think during the 1.0 crunch for example like yeah 90% of tasks that came through I could assign what I thought was a pretty good value and then look at it with the guys and they'd be like yep yep yep yep cool yep another fun game to play uh for any aspiring producers out there is play the whatif game uh with anybody who's giving you an estimate so it's like especially the longer the task like if it's a two to three week kind of a thing and they're like yeah you can probably do the three or four weeks and it's like oh feel like taking a day off you might what if you get sick what if your dog gets sick you know and just kind of like all these things that kind of it's kind of evil it's like all these bad things that could happen in your life that could derail you but um you know there's a lot of things that people don't account for like it's a totally natural they've actually done studies on it they
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read read them in the books which are books like drive by Daniel pink which are great um one yeah anyways you you as a human being have a natural predilection to underestimate a large task and overestimate a small task and so you can apply kind of like some baseline modifiers mathematically so back to your is it calculable average good one is everybody works about 70% of an 8 hour day between going to the bathroom eating lunch and blah blah blah so that's another one that you can look at oh if I have uh 40 hours of tasks that's probably going to be a week and a half's worth of work so there's kind of little things you can do like that mathematically um and the rest is yeah there's gut there's kind of especially when you're looking at the fining of a project you can see oh okay what's our burndown saying how many bugs entered versus how many resolved you okay what's our rate of increase and change in that
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and you can start to do your own little math that says okay well we'll probably be around this date I remember for arena Commander 8 uh I knew in order to ship we needed to get all criticals and Majors done and so I just applied that math and I said it was I think the date was May 30 May 30th and we ended up going on June 4th how bad that was back in like March yeah it's not bad I was actually very proud of that that's good well done so it's both it's math and gut yeah I you know and to that point I think um experience you know the reason they say the more time you're in something and this goes with any kind of job the more time you're in something the more comfortable you get with that information so uh the more experience you have whether it's with a team or just working in an industry or working with a certain type of product maybe you just always make fpss the better the better it is for your bidding and and your and your gut then reacts to that experience but the one thing I challenge people on with that experience is always
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still start with experience I think start with that knowledge but then add to it break it right don't just a lot of I think a lot of producers get stuck in that you sit in your Zone you got it it's like well but technolog is constantly changing new Fantastic talents coming out of college right there's new things that people are out there doing with a smaller team than you've ever done 203 years entirely new ways to manage you got it so always be agile enough to move with that stuff but you know I think a good foundation of experience is good yeah yeah um all right yeah great question what do you got up next yeah I got next uh zero Lambda SS what do producers do to sharpen their skills being tired is obviously a factor and it can affect performance and how quickly things are managed so that's a given that a good night's sleep can increase your capacity to handle things however in terms of other things outside of work what sorts
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of activities can you do to improve your skills for production are there exercises in a software program that you can use as a resource or an extracurricular group or of other producers you're part of books you've read to Garner inspiration yes great question okay I feel bad now cuz actually this is a fantastic question I read this question on the forums this morning when we were picking our questions and I was like wow that's a great question I should just answer that and I wrote him an answer in the forums so go to the forums next question no no no but honestly we should answer because it's a it was a really good one it's a great well I hope you'll be able to say to that speak to that stuff that you had already posted about you had some prep time um there is a lot of things you can do um there's a lot of different aspects to being a producer and so there's a lot of different skills you can learn in different places to get ready for this kind of role uh so books
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are great like you just talked about Drive um my one of my favorite kind of leadership books is uh First Break All the Rules there's it's uh it's fantastic and then they have a strength one after it uh and then there's um the game developers handbook and there's a production book out there there's a team leadership for the game development um written by Seth Spalding that I loved it was just kind of overview picture of kind of small studios though there's a ton of really cool books out there from very Talent Ed D carneg How to Win Friends and Influence People yep that's fantastic one because I think uh what's cool about this job or strange is that we have so many different elements of it we can learn from so many different things right so being a manager at your local convenience store is still helpful for becoming a producer right leading people managing a process being responsible being um held accountable for things that's that's very important um there are tons of people out there making games all over the place with the
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amount of sdks out there and the amount of opportunities nowadays not just including the schools that are coming popping up everywhere uh but there's tons of cool game I can't think some of the websites but there's uh some websites you just Google looking for writer looking for producer looking for developer um jump in on one of those and say hey I'll be your producer for it I don't know what that means but how can I help and then try to start forming a team and then help that team achieve one thing even if this is your first Sprint um use different types of project management scrum agile waterfall uh the PMP program that talks about the the whole large project management process it's really so there's tons of really great schooling and there's tons of different things you can focus on to be good at this job playing games is awesome but that's not the only part of this job in fact you need to love making games or making entertainment um as much or more than you love playing them did I think
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do this job yeah no and there's there's a lot of uh like like Eric C discovered there's a lot of great project management training resources reading uh there's a lot of great books on psychology and people management and dealing with people that is a large part of your job is dealing with communication and individuals you can also I mean another great tactic and i' I've done this myself which is learn each of the pieces of software of the team that you're dealing with so you can actually speak to them and talk to them and understand when they describe a problem to you what that problem means how long it's going to take and then I mean there's other things that you can't you can't do unless you've been in the industry but it's like you know a good characteristic always stay self-aware um it's kind of horrible but I'll probably spend a lot of my time at night or you know kind of the bathroom time or whatever you know thinking about
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past decisions I made past things I said how I handled this interaction and replaying it in my mind over and over what I did this way what if I done this way and trying to absorb some new outcome and it's kind of like running a permanent retrospective on your life I guess it's like what did I mess up what do we do okay but could be better and what do we do well you know then the other things you know like uh E3 is great you know we're going to go to E3 a little bit later today um E3 GDC seeing old co-workers is like developing a network of you know mentors you know respected co-workers even if you have never worked with them before you have people that just you respect and you have a relationship with and you know a lot of times when I have a big problem or a big question I need answering I kind of go to what I call like my small counsil you know what I mean and I try to bounce it off as many people as possible and come
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to consensus of opinion yeah yeah and to to speak about the software thing so to give some examples right like 3ds Max Maya are used a lot um for production tracking jir getting andir shotgun software any kind of production tracking software moft project I've seen used a lot of companies project handt and you can get free trials you totally can um and then what other programs could people get their hands dirty with visual studio uh actually I think if I'm not mistaken I think they're going to make Visual Studio free hey uh I think that was an announcement recently I can't remember exactly but yeah Visual Studio I mean learning seriously just the basics of programming like there are so many tutorials out there they'll teach you about what's a virtual function what's a pointer how do these things work how do they interact you know how to set up a program um you know and you might do
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something stupid like me and just make a little MS DOS calculator but yeah you know it gives you a little bit of a foundation that you can build from right yeah and I think um understanding a little bit about what team you know because being just a generic producer that helps everyone is fantastic but you'll see as we talked about earlier with different skill sets there might be a certain thing you have a passion about in in kind of the back of your head so I've a big fan of art I did a lot of art growing up I have a BFA and so I was I like working around artists and helping encourage them to do a great job so doesn't necessarily mean I don't want to work with everybody the designers and the programmers but that's kind of my thing that I know the most about so I like to help them and and um the more you know the better it is to go back you for to another question we talked about earlier was understanding bids and how much time people take the more you understand about what job they're doing not in-depth but just a base knowledge the better it is when they say that'll
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take me four days you can kind of go well that seems like normally it's only taking us two CU I know what software you're using I've know you know how takes generally to make that piece of art cuz I've seen somebody else do it that's you know and it just helps fuel that uh that producer inside you yeah yeah so great question I hope that answered it there was a lot of questions I hope we got them all yeah and if you have other questions always feel free to reach out to us we love answering questions we'll answer you on the forums that's right that's right that's right I hope that lined up with what you said on the Forum uh mostly yeah all right so our next question comes to us from weon six of Imperium dear producers a we have the process seen the process of fixing bugs on bug Smashers awesome programmer sits down thinks and Magic code flies out of his fingers is the process of implementing a new feature similar a lot
00:32:09
of people seem to think so could you walk us through beginning to end the process of taking a feature from an idea out of Chris Robert's head or someone else's head all the way to being played on our computers including some obstacles you run into and how you overcome them of particular interest to me are the localized ship physics instances ghost or grabby hands so let's take uh of this I think the best would be ghost ghost is a really good example we're going through right now so to step through that process is the process similar to implementing features fixing a bug no fixing a bug is part of implementing a feature there's a whole stage for that at the end um the reality is every feature is a package of bugs that you haven't created yet um so with every feature you have to build in a
00:32:56
bunch of QA and Bug fixing time at the end CU it will happen U even the best Engineers on the planet it's not even that they're making mistakes it's just things evolve over time or this thing over here impacted them in a way that wasn't unforeseeable so with the example of ghost though for example we have a we have a need in the game right a need gets identified and that's really when you're talking about a new feature it's either a need or a new idea um in the system in the example of ghost it was a need we have the need to be able to understand where the player is versus where the ship is and what their respective states are so that we can have them interact in appropriate ways like not being able to get into a turret when somebody else is already in that turret or being aware that the ladder is down thus so you should climb the ladder rather than playing the deploy ladder animation or detecting the player to
00:33:43
turn on lights anyways ton of examples I could give you but these were a list of needs that were identified by Chris by the designers and so what basically happens is they go away and they write up a list of hey here are all the needs here are the problems that we have that we need to solve in order to accomplish these things and now generally this would be described as your your gdd your game design document or your level design document or in this case a feature design document these are the things that we have that our list of problems and then you take those and you hand those over to the engineering team and they'll tell you okay we think the best way to fix this would be and then they document their technical design document and they all peer review it and then they sit back down with the designers they hold the two together and they kind of okay does this really is this the best solution for solving all of these problems in one holistic way um then then it comes to the okay green lit everybody's happy we we this is exactly
00:34:31
what we want to do this is how we want to do it everybody's on board we have the strike team formed then we literally sit down and break it down from beginning to end and some of these things take six months uh even longer that you say okay well here's where we're going to start here's the easiest simplest and then build build build and you usually start with the framework the foundation then build and add features on top of that and then at the end or throughout the process but then at the end you'll have a long kind of buffer time for QA testing bug fixing integration into whatever the relevant stream that you're supposed to be in so for example this feature might be built on that double pyramid down in Game Dev Arena Commander subset feature branch of ghost and then it's getting constant Integrations with Arena commander and then eventually it needs to get integrated into that integrated in main so you have to put in maybe a week's time to solve any issues so that's
00:35:19
really the the super basic and I could talk about it forever but I've probably gone too long already the super basic to getting it all the way down into the game yeah great question cool am I last not this last uh I think so yeah last went fast from Aragorn BH what do you think BH stands for bad bad hands bad hands cool a cool name Aragon bad hands imagine that you have two artists designers or other Sig employees working on a project within Star Citizen that you are producing along the way they have a professional disagreement agent about what they should do and it is clear that it would be uh not be possible to accommodate both versions how do you determine which version to keep and which one to scrap
00:36:08
it is difficult to tell a fellow employee that even though they are working hard they need to change how they're doing their job because it doesn't fit into the plans into your plans what tools do you use to minimize the possibility of the situation described above great question uh and this kind of uh I don't think it was a very good question oh we have to we have to resolve it we need to how do we tell K we going to do it right here example role play role play uh that is a great question and and this goes back to some the questions about the soft skills of the job and the communication partions of the job um it is very important I think to to help everyone understand that their ideas matter their opinions matter um what they have to say is totally important um and I think Travis actually talked about this earlier when it was how do you have that that professional debate where you can
00:36:55
ultimately come to a compromise um so for for me at least how I would try to resolve this is understanding both of the what they're both looking for right um honestly one of the best tools of our trade and getting is getting in the same room and helping us all hash it out because in this industry we're all professionals right we may we may be making entertainment and we may be really passionate about what we're making but and genuinely too everybody involved i' I've yet to meet a person that's super super selfish yes um so everybody's really in it they just legitimately are having an argument because of what's best for the product which like the best ARG the best argument you possibly have so this you're already starting off with strong in the right way um so helping them come to a a compromise is now your goal how them help them come to an understanding that whichever one is right is is also your goal so getting them in the same room uh helping them guide that conversation um giving them both a
00:37:43
platform to speak out whatever it is make sure all the key stakeholders are there to hear all the sides and then we walk the hope is to walk out of there and that's one of the things us as producers try to do in meetings when we're we're helping guide a meeting is to walk out of there with a set solution that we all feel good about we may not feel great about it especially like you mentioned uh aror BH that um it's hard to tell somebody great idea but we're not going to use that idea um but when you're all together and you've come to a compromise honestly it's not that difficult again they're professionals we're all professionals we're all adults and we all understand that you know okay I I I got what you're saying I still would like to do mine but that does sound like the best for the project let's move forward with that it tends to resolve itself through through just simple guidance communication and getting the team together to come up with a good plan no and I think what Eric said is exact how you it's exactly how you approach solving a problem that
00:38:30
has happened a conflict that has happened and the other the best problems are the ones you don't have to solve so I mean you know I think the example that he's giving here is probably to when I when I listen to it and I hear the situation it's kind of like that's something that maybe before could have been been completely eliminated just by having like more clear defined roles and responsibilities CU these two guys apparently were working on the same thing and had a competing method going for some amount of time before we had to sit them down and talk to them absolutely which would us making a mistake anyway because that would be a producer's fault for having two people working in parallel so on the same thing that's a great point I think what we came to here is a symptom of a more root problem that root problem is establishing clear Define roles for each person of the team I'm going to jump right on what you just said um and once everybody kind of understands it it's totally okay to have opinions about what every else is working on but also
00:39:17
respecting each other enough to know all right that's your field of of expertise this is how I've done it for many years in the industry here's my perspective but um and they're very clearly defined that this is that person I think that's we've had a lot of success with establishing like clear ownership on different pieces of the game even pieces of features when that way cuz I mean and that's the thing that everybody should understand is everybody has opinions um and actually a lot of the people on the team like Zayn's a great example right Zayn's super dedicated Zayn spends an amazing amount of time working on his art yeah and he will be the first one to walk up and ask you what do you think what could I do better how could this be better what's it like to play with this did you guys like this thing I did or not you know and so everybody's very open to feedback I think everybody just needs to have ownership and then they can run a nice little little uh operation I I love that last Point T by
00:40:06
Zay I think that's and that's pretty true with everybody I think even as producers right we I'll bounce off TR like does this make sense I'm going to do this this this and it gives you just another perspective to improve um and ultim we want want to make a really cool product for our backers and for our subscribers and just for people that want to have a great experience so that's what we're all fighting against each other for right that's ultimately what we're doing and as you said at the beginning this interview that's the best the best problem to have yeah so that's I think that brings us to our close H I think it does sad went so quick yeah well thank you guys for joining us it's been a real pleasure to answer your questions these are actually this is this a good round I don't want to talk bad about the other questions but these were great questions great questions these were great questions and I I really thoroughly enjoyed answering them I think you feel the same I feel the same way keep these coming these are fantastic questions we love answering them and taking the time to to kind of
00:40:54
go through our process and share everything we can absolutely so uh again to to remind everybody please uh if you're not a subscriber thank a fellow subscriber for making the show possible we thank them every day that we get to do one of these so thank you for the opportunity to come and speak with you guys thank you for the opportunity to work on this wonderful game it's been a true pleasure um and yeah we'll see you next time on uh 10 for the producers hey guys thanks for watching um temp for the chairman 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 of around the verse go
00:41:41
here please and I will see you in the verse

Transcript from YouTube’s automatic captions — punctuation and Star Citizen jargon are approximate. The video itself is hosted by CIG on the official channel.