There are quite a few articles out there on what exactly a producer does in the games industry. They typically go into excessive detail, and are a good way for an aspiring producer to really lose themselves in the detail. So, what is it like being a producer for an indie project?
First of all, Kung Fu Kingdom is a bit unique in this regard. Most indie teams cannot afford a full time producer to do whatever it is that producers do; but because KFK is a volunteer staffed project with only the Producer working full time, we can swing it. In fact, it is necessary for several reasons. But I digress – lets summarize what a producer in the games industry is supposed to do.
### What The Hell Do You Do? ###
I like to break the producers core tasks into two categories – scheduling and all that other junk. Wait, that’s not very informative is it? I mean, Programmers program, Writers write, Composers compose, Artists…. artist, so why is it so hard to define what a Producer does? Well, it is not that hard to define, it just requires a little acceptance of ambiguity in order to see what a producer does.
All producers are typically required to schedule development activities. They work with their team, figure out what needs to get done, estimate how long it will take to get that work done, cut or add features as necessary, and schedule out through the end of the project, more or less; update as necessary. OK, that’s out of the way. There are plenty of books on software scheduling if you want to read them.
The ambiguity comes from “all that other junk”. See, in addition to all the regular work that programmers, artists, and other developers need to handle, there pops up a constant and unrelenting list of little tasks like “Getting that model from Joe”, or “Negotiating a good price on this external asset”, or “Getting lunch orders for the team.” Fundamentally, these are things that the developers could handle themselves. However, as any of you know, once you get working really hard and are in “the zone”, pretty much anything can snap you out of it. By offloading all of these random tasks onto someone whose job is, fundamentally, to handle all of these random tasks, it makes the rest of the developers jobs easier.
This is especially true of a team of volunteers working part time on a project. Every second they need to deal with tiny tasks unrelated to their specialty but none-the-less necessary is a second they are not contributing to a complete and final product.
### Doing…. Nothing ###
So why do producers sometimes look like they have nothing to do? Well, because sometimes they have nothing to do. Scheduling can only take up so much time in a day. The rest of their day is spent dealing with these little/sometimes big issues that pop up. But like in the retail world, all the customers seem to come in all at once, and then disappear for the rest of the day. This is where good producers fill their time with helpful work, like QA, or perhaps designing a scenario. At Firaxis, scenarios for their Civilization franchise are often created by producers. The key trick here is to not take on anything critical to development, because at the end of the day you need to be able to drop whatever it is you are working on in order to help the rest of the development team get their work done – that is a producers job. A producer is like the person at the bottom of an upsidown human pyramid. They support everyone else in the completion of their job.
I’d like to take some time to write about how being a producer for an indie company is different than for a traditional (hah) software company, but also about how there are some striking overlaps where we might not assume there would be. However, that will have to wait until another day as this post is getting a bit long.