Gamasutra - Producers Of The Roundtable: Structuring Your Team

[Gamasutra is partnering with GameProducer.net, a game production resource, for a series of Q&As named "Producers of the Round Table". The Round Table is a place for producers who work in game industry to present their opinions in response to questions. The most recent article in the series dealt with "getting coders and artists to communicate".

In this installment, which deals with programmer and artist communication, participants include Robbie Edwards, senior producer at Red Storm Entertainment, Ben Gunstone, production director at Stainless Games, Justin D'Onofrio, producer at Freeverse, and Frank Rogan, producer at Gas Powered Games.]

How do you deal with structuring your team in terms of different disciplines reporting to leads?

Robbie Edwards: Underneath the producer, we have leads for design, art and engineering for their respective departments within the team. We then break down the departments further into disciplines that are small groups of similarly skilled developers lead by a single workgroup coordinator. For the most part, these workgroups consist solely of one department, but in a few cases, they are cross departmental.

Ben Gunstone: On all of our games we have a lead artist and a lead coder. Ideally we also have a design lead as well but with the smaller download titles that design lead is normally spread across multiple projects. From there it is completely flat.

Our teams are smaller, though, than normal retail products, normally looking at two to three artists and two to four coders per game, so there isn't room for any more levels of hierarchy.

Our leads also spend most of their time doing their scheduled tasks and don't need to spend much time on team-management - mainly as the teams are so small that communication is so much easier. It's also helped by the fact that we always position team members together in the office. They are also supported by me and our assistant producer.

Justin D'Onofrio: While our current project calls for a smaller team, we still have a hierarchy in place. On the coding side, we have a network lead programmer, who reports to the project lead programmer. There's an assistant programmer who reports to both of these folks. On the art side, we have a 3D modeler, who reports to the creative lead (also the 2D artist). Both leads, and an assistant producer, report to me as producer.

That's in the office itself. Remotely, we have an audio engineer. He's considered the audio lead, and has as many of his own folks at his west coast studio reporting to him as needed. Also on the west coast, we work with an art studio, where an art technician reports to an art manager, who then reports to both myself and our creative lead.

Frank Rogan: We have leads for the traditional disciplines - engineering, design, art, animation, etc. - and those leads serve as both the discipline leads as well as in an advisory capacity with the producer for the project itself. It's a pretty traditional model.

Comments

Anonymous

4 Jul 2008 at 1:59 pm PST

Nice and well summed up overview of team organizations. My own experiences agree with everything that Frank said, especially the closing paragraph.

Tim Carter

5 Jul 2008 at 2:03 pm PST

Team organization reminds me of "big government". The best way to organize it is to get as much process and rigmarole out of the way of talent as possible. If you need to implement steps and procedures at every possible turn you're a control freak. Let your talent do its job.

Game development too often is run in a byzantine, bureaucratic manner.

Anonymous

6 Jul 2008 at 12:00 am PST

Read some literature on software engineering practices, find out just how many projects fall apart due to mismanagement, and you might just discover why it has to be like that.

Stone Bytes

6 Jul 2008 at 9:45 am PST

It might sound bizaare, but in a deeply segmented cell/pod structure, why not organize internal sympathetic symposiums of some sort to be sure to keep every one up to date about the game's overall vision, and have each cell/pod know the others are doing, and take that opportunity to highlight good points and try to discuss about past problems and those which might get in the way?

Jeff Zugale

7 Jul 2008 at 10:29 am PST

Has anyone talked about how many game development studios are actually *two* companies, not just one - an entertainment production company AND a software company?

These two companies are not always compatible in terms of practices, philosophies and goals. I'd like to see some articles about how the differences between creative entertainment production and software development complicate management of game productions.

Tim Carter

7 Jul 2008 at 12:53 pm PST

Ummm... game development is only related to software engineering in an outside manner. The "software engineering" part is maybe one third of it (especially with the advent of outsourcing and extensive middleware). The rest - as much as the game industry hates to admit it - is entertainment. In entertainment, putting creators under the yolk of corporate proceduralism is the *kiss of death*.

Tim Carter

7 Jul 2008 at 1:07 pm PST

A little qualification. It's true that a game is a piece of software. But that is only the technical aspect. It's just a "price of admission". Depending on who you speak to, what makes a game live or die lies in the intangible elements behind it. It's possible to have a well-developed, highly-stable piece of software that, nevertheless, lacks spark and life from a content/subject perspective.

(It looks beautiful! The net code is awesome! But it has guys with plasma guns and battle armour, bunny-hopping around shooting Space Zombies... zzzzzzzzzzzzzzz)

Jeff Zugale

8 Jul 2008 at 11:55 am PST

Oh I agree about that, but it's also possible to have a splendidly-designed, beautifully-arted game that is nearly unplayable because the software part just doesn't work well. Wonky controls, random crashes, weird bugs, poor camera intelligence... you find these things in lots of games. It should not be taken for granted that everyone's game engine is of solid quality.

Weakness on the software side of a game company can cripple everything else the company does, so I can't really agree with you that software engineering is only related to games in an "outside manner." Without the software these games don't exist.

Tawna Evans

12 Jul 2008 at 9:53 pm PST

Clever suggestion, Stone Bytes. I suppose the leads would generate summaries of their major achievments and problem areas to share with the producer, and then the producer could use that to create documents for the entire development team to show the big picture of the projects that everybody works on.

Michael Bartnett

14 Jul 2008 at 9:48 pm PST

As a student I find this to be an interesting insight as to how game development studios function, but I'm somewhat disappointed by how the audio department is considered exterior for the most part. By keeping your modeling and animation department in-house you emphasize the importance of aesthetically consistent visual content. Why not place the same emphasis on audio and music?