Embracing Ambiguity: How to Do Good Work When You Don't Know What to Do

all right i think it's 10 o'clock good morning everybody welcome to the producer boot camp um some housekeeping things first so please be sure to silence your cell phones uh make sure to fill out the evaluations afterward those are actually super useful for us uh when speaking to calibrate and make sure that people get the most out of the talks as they can um i'm gonna put up at the end of my talk i'm gonna put my email address up you don't need to take pictures of the slides if you email me i will send them to you i'll send you a pdf with my notes and everything so don't bother taking pictures um and i'm gonna leave a bunch of time for q a at the end so you know keep track of any questions you want to ask all right i'm going to go ahead and start uh so this is the producer bootcamp my name is ruth to mandel and i've been a producer project manager program manager in games and game adjacent technologies for about 16 years and i've kind of developed over time this love hate relationship with ambiguity i want to talk about today why there's so much ambiguity in game development what kinds of problems it can cause and what you as producers can do about it so to start with i'd like to know how many people here are currently a producer on a video game oh lots of you awesome all right and then how many of you are game developers but not producers and then how many of you are students who want to get into game development or production cool okay awesome so to start with i'm going to define some things i'm going to say the word ambiguity a lot in this talk so i want to make sure that it's clear what i'm talking about ambiguity is when you don't have enough information to make good decisions and it's different from risk here's how so when you bet 100 on a coin flip that's taking a risk you have a ton of information you know how many possible outcomes there are you know the approximate odds of those outcomes and you know what's going to happen to you in either outcome you're either going to win 100 or you're going to lose 100 and there's about a 50 50 chance of that happening now humans love risk we cannot get enough of it there is you know there's billion dollar casino industries built around how much we completely love this like we love taking risks and taking chances when we know approximately the odds and what's going to happen to us unfortunately ambiguity is like betting a hundred dollars on if i roll the dice in this cup or they can add up to at least 20. you have very little information on which to base that decision you don't know how many dice i have or how many sides they have or what numbers are on them you don't even know if i have dice in this cup at all so you really don't have enough information to make that decision confidently now as much as humans love risk and seek it out we avoid ambiguity we really don't like it it makes us uncomfortable it makes us unhappy and nervous and unfortunately in game development almost every decision we make is that kind of ambiguous decision where we really don't have enough information if you're trying to decide whether to include multiplayer in your game for example you don't know how much time and energy that's going to cost you you don't know how many bugs it's going to introduce you don't know if it's going to be good or not or if it's going to be better or worse than the single player mode of your game maybe players will love it maybe they'll hate it maybe it'll raise your metacritic maybe it'll lower it right there's tons of possible outcomes and you really don't have a lot of information to use to predict how likely each of those outcomes are and you don't necessarily know what's going to happen to you or your studio in any of those possible outcomes so ambiguity is really stressful we don't like it we try to avoid it but in game development we deal with it constantly and not only is ambiguity scary and uncomfortable to ship your game you have to make all the decisions and get rid of all of the ambiguity you can't ship a game with anything tbd right and when you ship a game you have made every single decision and you've decided every single aspect of every feature every character every single thing in your game um even in live games if you're doing regular releases you have to decide every single aspect of every single thing that goes into each release right so so you can only ship when all of the ambiguity is gone how many people here are working on a project that's like super straightforward and well understood with basically no ambiguity oh one one person okay awesome yeah uh since 2001 i've worked at seven studios i've shipped like a dozen games and i've worked on a project like that once and that makes sense because most of us get into game development because we want to innovate right we want to make awesome new things and when you're innovating is exactly when you have the most ambiguity because you're doing something new so the information about you know how to make your decisions really doesn't exist yet you are creating that information um the other time there's lots of ambiguity is when we're personally doing something that we've never done before which is also when we're growing the most and learning the most ourselves and becoming better game developers right so we're again we're dealing with this all the time and especially those of us working in vr there's tons of ambiguity there because nobody even knows yet like what good vr games are or anything about it right so tons and tons of ambiguity and okay how many people here are working on a really ambiguous game where we have tons of unknowns to deal with yeah so you're you're all in good company all right let's talk about why that's hard you know it's it's hard to make good decisions when you just don't know what's going to happen and there are a lot of things that are unknown when you're making a game some of them you can control and some of them you really can't right so first of all like what is your game what game are you making what's it going to be like what is your division for your game a lot of times that's super ambiguous and then how do you make it like how do you execute on that vision and and what's going to actually happen when you sit down and start making this game and then you know even things like team roles and team organization like who's responsible for what on your project who's in charge of what and who gets to make which decisions that can be super ambiguous and then things you don't have control over like your partner's decisions maybe your publisher you know decides tomorrow morning that they really hate first person shooters now you know like who knows anything could happen right and again you don't know the possible outcomes or necessarily what's going to happen to you and your team in any of those outcomes market forces you know maybe player maybe a new game comes out that redefines your genre tomorrow and you have to sit down and decide if you're going to you know redesign your game or not again with very little information on which to base that decision you know other nasty surprises maybe your studio floods tomorrow and you lose all of your source code right maybe your only multiplayer engineer quiz you can't control a lot of these things but as a producer you have to plan for them and you have to be prepared for them okay so what can producers do about ambiguity in this talk i want to talk about some of the problems that arise from really ambiguous situations and what you as the producer can do to either solve these problems or avoid them before they happen again because ambiguity is something that all of us are going to face on almost every project so if you can get really good at dealing gracefully with it you are going to be a really valuable producer and a better producer so as a producer your job is to make sure the right work gets done okay this is basic you know basic project management make sure that the right work is getting done uh the number one thing that my team looks for when hiring project managers is the ability to deal gracefully with ambiguity because as producers there's a lot of things that we can do to manage this uncertainty and really it's kind of the core of our job um because this is what your job is as a producer right so prioritization you know if you're trying to make sure the right work gets done you need to make sure that your team knows what the right work is driving decisions making sure that the right work is defined when it needs to be and gathering the information that people need to define which is the right work scheduling and tasking communicating what the right work is to people making sure that everyone knows who's doing it and making sure that the things are getting you know that are being worked on when they need to be and then owning deadlines so making sure that work gets done and making sure everyone understands what done means so this is your job now on super ambiguous projects you can get into this kind of worst case scenario state where your job becomes something that's much harder to do prioritization turns into kind of wild guesses where everything's constantly changing all the time um you know driving decisions you just hear let me think about it some more from everybody and they just won't decide you know scheduling and tasking you're like someone should really do something we're not getting anywhere you make a schedule and three weeks later it just looks like a total fantasy and then you know owning deadlines becomes like hey we passed feature complete four weeks ago and i don't think we're feature complete at all multiplayer doesn't work someone should probably do something about it this is sad because it's not not a good situation um it's it's really hard to deal with and one of the hardest things about it is often in this situation you don't really know if it's a problem or if you just don't know how to deal with it right so you kind of you don't know if you're the crazy person or if everyone else is crazy and you know sometimes everyone else on your team thinks this is fine right like your creative director is having a blast coming up with cool new features that they want to put in the game and they tell you like you know making a great game is way more important than hitting some arbitrary milestone right and your engineers are like other game studios do it this way they just you know make great games and they don't even have producers like i would much rather work there they don't have producers they just listen to their engineers and they make awesome games and isn't that really the important thing so are you turning into one of those like super process heavy producers that can only like make a schedule and follow it and isn't going to make a great game like how do you know and really the question is is it okay if things are ambiguous on your project right now and of course it depends it depends on a lot of things so first of all where is the ambiguity to successfully make a game you have to have a core vision of a game that you want to make and then you use that vision to drive all those thousands of execution decisions that you have to make over the course of your development um the higher level a decision is the more of your project it affects the more important is that that decision get made and made early you have to get rid of any ambiguity in your game's vision as early as possible if you don't have a clear well-defined and well-understood vision for your game you should do that first that should be your top priority and really nothing else i'm going to talk about matters if you don't have that if you haven't already i really encourage everyone who's a producer to read the game outcomes project it was a series of articles i'll link to it in the notes it was published a couple of years ago paul tozer and his team surveyed hundreds of game developers and they asked them questions about their process you know how they made decisions on their team how their team was structured a bunch of different questions and then they correlated the answers to those questions against the success of the finished games and not just metacritic but return on investment and how well that game met the expectations of the development team themselves and what they found was that the strongest correlating factor to a successful game was a viable compelling clear and well communicated shared vision games that had this were successful in games that didn't have this were not successful so if you don't have this clear strong agree on vision for your game then you need to get one as a producer that is your top job if you do have one then you can reuse it to drive again all of those execution decisions and get rid of the other ambiguity on the project all right similarly ambiguity is less negative and can even be positive if you're early on in development so remember you know ambiguity is when you don't have enough information so this is the cone of uncertainty and early on in a project there are tons of unknowns and tons of uncertainty right you don't know what game you're making you don't know maybe what engine you're going to use you don't know what the main character will look like you have to develop all of that information over time and then by the time you ship you know every single thing where you've decided everything everything is precisely defined to get there you have to drive this cone down over time now the thing is this cone does not narrow on its own right it wants to get wider people want to play around they want to innovate they want to come up with cool new stuff but you as the producer have to make sure that the cone is trending in the right direction so that it gets to zero by the time you ship and again if you have time to be in pre-production and and you know innovate and come up with cool stuff and try things then do that like you know that's fine just again as a producer you have to keep track of where you are and where things are trending and then third whether or not ambiguity is a problem depends on your constraints so this is the iron triangle and you may have heard of it as fast cheaper good pick two but in game development usually we have to pick all three and we have to ship a good game and it has to have a bunch of features on it that the publisher demands or whatever um so it can be really difficult and really this iron triangle it's a way to think about your constraints so the smaller your budget is the shorter your schedule and the more features you have to include the less room you have for ambiguity the less room you have for that innovation and creativity and the more you just have to focus on executing um if you know again if you have all the time and money you need to prototype for three years and be in pre-production then you know go for it knock yourselves out but if you don't then you have to really tighten things down um the least ambiguous game i ever worked on was an expansion pack to a sequel and the budget was small the schedule was super tight and because it was based on existing games we didn't have a lot of room for innovation right we we knew a lot about the game we were going to make so we just executed and it went really well you know it wasn't the most innovative game ever but it was fine and and we were able to you know keep the ambiguity really low and just execute and then finally ambiguity is a problem if it's causing problems on your project so i'm going to talk about five kind of major problems that can result from too much ambiguity and i'm going to talk about them and and give you some tools you can use to either again avoid these problems or fix them so first of all churning without progress this is when you have too much ambiguity to be able to actually make real progress on your game no matter how hard you work it just kind of feels like you're not really getting anywhere the second feature creep you don't really know what your game is so you just kind of add more stuff hoping that you'll make it better and then team anxiety your team is afraid of what might happen because they can't really predict outcomes so they get kind of nervous and anxious and they aren't able to do their best work conflict and resentment you feel like the ambiguity is somebody's fault so you have to blame somebody obviously it's not my fault because i'm doing my best so it must be somebody's fault and then indecision you don't have enough information to make good decisions so you just don't make them so you know obviously most of the time the problems aren't going to be as clear as i'm going to lay them out here they're not going to be super clear-cut but again even the best well-managed projects with super clear goals are going to run into some ambiguity that's going to make your team maybe start churning or start getting anxious and you know sometimes these are small isolated problems that are easy to fix but sometimes if they're not addressed they can grow into big giant major problems that will destroy your team so let's go over some things that you as a producer can do to fix these problems before they get that big all right so churning without progress is probably the most damaging result of ambiguity right so this is when you're doing a bunch of things but you're not really getting anywhere and this is usually again because your vision isn't clear enough to know if you're really driving toward it or not or if you're getting closer to your vision or not so here are some problems to watch for first of all if your game isn't changing right maybe you have weekly design reviews or regular regular reviews where you look at the game and it's not really changing it's not any different people are playing on their phones during design reviews because there's just nothing interesting happening um or your milestones slip people can't really tell you when they're going to get something done because they're kind of blocked by something they can't really define rat holing or bike shedding these are both jargon terms for focusing on a small problem that's easy to fix while ignoring a gigantic problem that's hard to fix so like you know you haven't decided which engine you're going to use yet but you have these giant epic reply all email threads about which font to use right because that's like a much easier problem and something people really like focusing on and diving into because they just want to really not think about the fact that there's this huge problem they haven't fixed yet and last you know throwing away work so i was a level designer on a game where the level design team was pumping out levels like clockwork so each of us were making three levels every three weeks and they were good levels like we were doing good work you know we were having an okay time we were delivering very regularly but the story for the game wasn't written yet at all the monster behaviors weren't defined um there were tons of things about the game that nobody knew yet so you know everything we were doing was basically destined to be thrown away the other problem was of the you know the levels we were making two out of every three of them were rejected by the lead designer as like no this isn't really what i'm thinking so we were completely spinning our wheels right we were doing our best but it wasn't really going anywhere and ultimately all of that work was thrown away remember that people don't get into game development because they're lazy right they get into game development because they want to make awesome things and they will do that even if you don't have your clear vision that they can work towards they're going to do their best to do good work and throwing that work away is a huge waste and it's really demoralizing so you shouldn't do it here's what you can do as a producer to fix that situation so again i'm going to say this over and over and over and over drive towards a clear vision remember that the one thing that will help your team be successful is to have a strong clear vision and if you don't have that make that your top priority now second if you do have a clear vision for your game but you still feel like your team is kind of spinning their wheels and not really getting anywhere you know maybe set shorter term goals or prototype goals to where your team can get in the habit of finishing things and where you can build something that you can really play test so you know let's say you build a vertical slice which is where you sort of try to build something that reflects your final game vision to the point where it's playable and then your team can play it and find out okay what is really good about this what's the strengths of our game vision what are the things that players are going to really fall in love with and then also what are the things that took up a bunch of time and effort but really aren't that good maybe we should cut those things right and focus on the things that are awesome and then third is your team exploring cool innovative ideas during pre-production you know that's fine or are they totally lost in the woods right remember that the difference between exploring and being lost is if you're exploring you're going towards something and you can kind of tell if you're getting closer to it but if you're just lost you're lost and you're not really getting anywhere um again if you have the time and money to be lost for a little while that can be really useful but if you don't make sure that you're not um and then if you're kind of churning but it looks like it might be temporary and you're not really sure you can do something called time boxing and that's where you say okay we don't know yet if we're going to do multiplayer we're trying some things we're doing some prototypes but if we haven't decided by may then we should really start worrying because our schedule is not going to let us spend any more time on this right or even if your team is reluctant or if you don't want to bring that up to your team maybe just internally yourself as the producer you can say okay if we haven't decided by may i'm personally gonna start worrying and freaking out and raising this to people right i'm gonna i'm gonna raise some flags if we haven't decided this in two months or whatever um you know execution always takes longer than you think especially if you're doing something new which you probably are so keep that in mind and just try as a producer to be a little conservative with your schedule and then last if your team is so stuck that they can't make progress you can try something drastic okay so i don't know how many of you are familiar with scrum but scrum is a project management system that was developed specifically to unstick stuck teams um i think people use it a little too much probably more than they should but if your team is super stuck it might be worth trying something like that just change up the way you do your pro process you know change up the way you schedule or track work or something like that you know if you're having daily standups maybe change to weekly or something like try changing things so that maybe it kicks your team out of their deadlock but again the most important thing is having a clear vision so i'm going to talk about a tool for developing and protecting that game vision okay so these are pillars i made these up so they're not very good so this is a sample sample pillars for a made-up game the player is a powerful commander of a dragon army players can battle their armies while waiting for the bus and players use their huge inventory of magic items to power up their dragons okay so again not the best pillars ever but reading them you can envision what this game would be like right and if you're working on this game you can kind of use these as a yardstick to think about the work you're doing right if you're working on the ui for giving your dragons commands that's really important that supports the top pillar if you're working on customizable dragon houses right that doesn't really support any of the pillars it's probably extraneous and you don't need to do it so pillars are kind of like a distillation of your entire design dock into a couple of bullets and they're easy to communicate they're easy for your team to remember and understand and you can kind of use them as a ruler for the work that you're doing they're also kind of like a pitch right if you if you told someone about these pillars if you were in an elevator with someone you told them this you would know pretty quickly if they were excited about the game or not what about it excites them what are they interested in learning more about right so it's it's kind of a distillation of what is your game down into a very short list um i talk about pillars and game vision all the time i really can't shut up about them and this is why i think that this is so important if you want to build a ship don't drum up people to collect wood and don't assign them tasks and work but rather teach them to long for the endless immensity of the sea i would bet that most people on your team did not get into game development because they really like following directions right they get into game development because they long to make amazing great games so make sure you have a vision for a game that your team will long to make and the players will long to play and that your team can believe in and be proud of and pour all of that creative energy into okay because if you don't you'll end up with feature creep and again this is where you aren't really sure what your game is so you kind of throw in random cool stuff hoping that it will be good it won't it will make it worse um or you know your creative director gets super duper excited about every new idea she comes across and nobody can tell her no or you don't know if you should tell her no or not or what you should say no to or you know you're halfway through production and your schedule is clearly completely impossible but you don't really know what to cut you don't know which features are going to have the most payoff and which ones are going to be big risks that end up not being very good i worked on a really big aaa game that actually had a super clear strong vision a great vision that everyone really loved but it was a big team we hadn't really worked together before the leadership was a little bit fractured the cost of failure was super high um there were a lot of stakeholders at the publisher level that were super invested in the game they wanted us to add a bunch of stuff you know we added all these expensive features to the game that it didn't really need that cost a ton of time and effort and then you know we would do these demos to the stakeholders who wanted them and they would kind of get excited but it was just this like total waste of time and then the features that were core to the vision of the game which again was super good were getting shortchanged and not really worked on as much so you know this caused a lot of tension and infighting and frustration among the team because we could see that the really cool game we were thinking of just wasn't getting done so what can you do in this situation first of all again ambiguity is when you don't have enough information to make good decisions okay so you can reduce ambiguity by getting information one way to do that is to get data by sitting down with your team and figuring out how much each of these features that you want to make are going to cost you right there's lots of ways to do this this is something that's you know there's a lot of articles written about um but you basically you sit down with your teams you list the features you want to do and you come up with some way to estimate the cost of each of them so you know it can be man months it can be arbitrary made up numbers it doesn't really matter but if you can estimate and assign some number to the cost of things again it'll give you a little peek inside this dice cup which can really help you make decisions and then honestly evaluate each feature against your game vision right so if you have pillars or a design dock or a vision statement you can evaluate those features you know do they really support our game vision or not are they extraneous right can we cut them and not really lose anything and remember that if your constraints are tight the tighter your constraints the less you can afford this extra stuff the more you have to focus on really just what do your pillars absolutely need and then you know you can work with your team to rank features based on these two aspects cost cost and value be brutally honest about how much the stuff is going to cost and how much you really need it so here's an example of a feature list ranked by benefit to the game so this could be you know just how much it supports the pillars or how good it is and then secondly by effort so this could be man hours it could be you know man months it could be just some arbitrary number and then based on those two numbers develop a value some some value estimate for how valuable is this feature to my game what's the return on investment um if you can use this to really generate your priority list start at the top and work down and then realize okay you know what these two features they seem cool but they really either don't have a lot of value to the game or they're just going to cost us too much we don't need to do them um make sure that you have some way to add numbers to things so that your team can really agree right and again these numbers do not have to be super precise they don't have to accurately reflect like the exact number of days you're going to spend on it but just having numbers that you can have a conversation about with your team is going to be really valuable there's a gdc 2015 talk about doing this on the witcher 3 which is super interesting i'm going to link to it in the notes and i recommend checking that out if you're more if you're interested in learning more about this all right so third team anxiety this is when your team just gets overwhelmed by the amount of ambiguity and they get unhappy they get negative or maybe they just kind of give up and stop putting so much effort in because they feel like their effort isn't going to the right place and maybe that's because they don't know what they're expected to do they don't know what success looks like for them um you know maybe this is because their game vision your game vision isn't really clear to them so they don't know what they're working towards or maybe they don't see how their work fits into that game of vision right like maybe they're working on something that doesn't really support any of the pillars so they don't understand how it fits or maybe they don't believe in your game vision maybe you're working on a game in a genre they don't respect or like or maybe they don't think the game you're making is good or maybe you or the leads on your team just don't have credibility so that you know you tell them what the vision for the game is and that hey you're working towards this thing that's really important but they just don't believe you one of the worst instances of this i ever saw so i was on a project that had an enormous amount of pressure right and tons of ambiguity the design for the game the core design kept changing really radically and that meant that the design team was crunching to implement these changes into the levels and you know catch up with the balance changes and all the other major changes that were happening so everyone was working crazy hours tempers were high stress was super high people were having like shouting matches on the floor over who wasn't doing their job you know years-long friendships were dissolving like it was a mess and in the middle of all of that we had a team meeting and one of the studio heads got up in front of the in front of everyone and said you know hey our plan is great if you guys are crunching it's your own fault for not planning well enough and like this happened over 10 years ago and i'm you know you can probably tell i'm still pretty upset about it like that was like a slap in the face right and not only because it was clear that our hard work wasn't being appreciated and respected but also because either they didn't know we were crunching this hard in which case like we didn't trust them anymore we didn't trust their judgment or they knew and they just didn't care right and neither of those are great so don't do this to your team please um what can you do what do i wish that my producer had done in this situation first you know be honest about what's happening there are problems on your project right be honest about them because you need credibility with your team and your team needs to know that you know what the problems are and you're willing to talk about them you know if that guy had stood up and said like look we know you're working long hours we know that things are super ambiguous right now but we're working on it and we appreciate what you're doing it would have been a very different situation right i would have respected him a lot more and the team would have been a lot happier so just you know make sure that people's work is appreciated again lazy people don't become game developers people are going to put in a ton of work so make sure they know that it's appreciated make sure it actually is appreciated and then you know second communicate critical information to your team if there's something they need to know to do good work make sure they're not the last to know it right make sure that they know all the information they need again ambiguity is when you don't have enough information so make sure your team has as much information as possible and then you know if your team doesn't have trust in your plan one way you can build trust is by executing your plan well showing your team look this plan is working right you know we're getting closer to the game we want to make things are going well the schedule resembles reality right now if the plan doesn't work you have a problem and maybe your team is right not to trust it and then you need to fix it but if you have a good plan execute it well be a good strong producer so your team can rely on you and the plan and feel some more confidence in what's going to happen to them and then you know keep your ears open for problems pull on little threads until you find out what's wrong remember that most of us are on teams full of like nice decent people most people do not want to complain or give you bad news but to be a good producer you need that bad news you need to be able to know the problems on your team so you can fix them right so if you hear someone complaining about how design doesn't know what they're doing or you know expressing a lack of confidence in your overall plan like pull on that find out what what's underlying that maybe it's something real that you need to fix and then last work with your team to really assess the risks to your project your project is going to have risks and sitting down and really talking them out and planning out what you would do if those things happened is a really valuable exercise if you don't have a plan b you don't really have a plan and again because there's so much ambiguity in game development sometimes you need to plan c d e f etcetera also right so here's an example of a risk assessment so when you sit down with your team or with your leads if you're on a big team and you ask them what are you afraid about like what keeps you up at night what are you afraid is going to happen and then you list those things write them down and then for each risk talk about how likely it is to happen and then what impact on your project would it have if it happened how bad would it be if this happened so and then you know talk about a mitigation plan what could you do if this happened or what can you do to prevent it not only is this going to make you feel like you have more control over your lives and over your situation but it will actually give you more control over your lives and your situation because again you're developing information you're creating information so that you have less ambiguity a lot of publishers require an updated risk assessment like this with every milestone and i think that's a really good idea i think this is super valuable and and every project i think could benefit from this okay number four conflict and resentment so nice people are usually good at hiding problems but sometimes those problems get so bad and so big that they blow up and you know again cause everything from shouting matches on the floor or just long-term simmering resentment that makes it harder for your team to work together and usually this is because of that combination of lots of ambiguity and tons of pressure right people don't behave well in those situations and they're going to want to lash out it's just it's human nature sometimes people on your team may be afraid to bring up ideas or ask questions in meetings because they're afraid of either being scapegoated like being seen as the problem or just that they won't be respected or listened to and you know maybe that is actually happening maybe people on your team do get thrown over the under the bus if they're the ones bringing up problems right and these problems aren't always visible maybe there's just some you know kind of invisible hidden resentment or fear or bad feelings and they're ready to erupt at any moment but you're not really seeing them because again people are pretty good at hiding them a friend of mine was a producer on a team that was under a ton of pressure to ship a launch title um you know the publishers priorities kept changing pretty wildly and the team was working super hard now they did manage to ship and they shipped a good game and it was you know critically acclaimed everyone was happy i was like okay that's over awesome everything's great and then the team did peer reviews and all of these huge interpersonal and team dynamic problems just boiled up in these peer reviews kind of out of nowhere and the team leadership was like really surprised they didn't even know that any of this was there because the team was like a bunch of senior people who didn't want to rock the boat they didn't want to distract from like this huge you know tons of pressure problems they had to ship this game so the leadership also had been hyper focused on shipping so they really hadn't noticed that their team was completely falling apart because it was all happening kind of invisibly okay so what can you do about this to prevent this from happening um first of all doing peer reviews earlier um so peer reviews are when you have everyone on your team pick like three to five people and write a short kind of blurb about okay how is this person doing what could they do better are there any problems with them right so this is something that you should do if you can it's a good way to surface problems it is difficult though first of all it's time consuming um second of all if there are a lot of personal problems on your team people may not be willing to attach their name to it and third you know people do not want to hurt someone else's feelings right like nobody wants to be mean or raise problems well most people don't and if you do these anonymously anonymous reporting isn't great either that can cause some problems too but it's better than nothing like if you have if you have problems that are so big that no one in team wants to speak up anonymous reporting or anonymous peer reviews may help you find those problems and again they're better than nothing um another better way though is one-on-ones so this is when everyone on your team has someone that they trust and respect that they talk to regularly just just you know the two of them and they're able to surface problems and kind of chew over things and develop solutions so even if you have a very small team with light management it helps to make sure that everyone on your team has someone that they're talking to regularly that they can again work with them to solve problems and just raise issues and that helps people also feel like they're being heard and listened to and respected which is important um second if your team members aren't comfortable speaking out you need to build psychological safety on your team so this is something that google did it's called project aristotle i'll link to it again in the notes but you should look it up google looked at all of their teams and they looked at which teams performed really well and were super strong and which teams were underperforming and they looked at correlating factors and the strongest correlation they found was something they called psychological safety and that's when people felt comfortable and safe expressing their feelings and ideas where everyone felt heard and respected right people didn't feel like they were being dismissed people weren't being talked over in meetings this is super super important you need to make sure that everyone on your team feels like they can express themselves without being you know disrespected or not listened to right so one thing you can do as a producer is in meetings make sure people aren't being talked over right make sure people are being listened to make sure people know that they are respected and that their ideas are listened to right this is something that you can do and it's super super valuable um you know ask people who don't usually speak up for their input and then really listen to and respect what they have to say and then you know third yourself be trustworthy so again especially if there's tons of ambiguity on your project make sure that there isn't any ambiguity about you the producer personally um you know make sure people can trust you do what you say you're going to do when you say you're going to do it this is actually a lot more rare than you might think and as a producer it will make you really really valuable um you know make sure that the information you're giving your team matches the information they're hearing other places make sure that people can really trust what you say and part of that is you know if you don't know something say you don't know it like be comfortable saying i don't know i don't know but i'll find out right don't don't pretend you know something when you don't people see through that you know it'll eat away at your credibility if you pretend you know things that you don't and you really need credibility as a producer to be able to solve any of these problems and then last make sure that the ownership areas of your project are super clear you as the producer can't make sure the right work is getting done if you don't know who's ultimately responsible for that work so you should know who owns every single feature or level or character or api integration on your project and really you should be able to sit down and write it down so here's an example of an ownership list and these can be as detailed or high level as you want but if you couldn't right now sit down and generate this list for your project then you have a problem as a producer you should be able to make this um secondly if you make this list and it's just like the same name over and over and over and over for everything and you don't have a one-person project uh then you do have a problem right anyone who has ownership over something needs to be able to make decisions about it and they're responsible for getting it done there's no reason to hire like really smart and motivated and creative people if you're not going to give them actual ownership over the work they're doing and control over it right there are people who just want to follow directions and do what they're told and they're way cheaper and sometimes easier to manage so just like hire those people save your money right if you're not going to give people ownership over their work don't hire awesome creative people because they'd rather work somewhere else anyway all right last indecision so i'm going to say it again ambiguity is when you don't have enough information to make decisions so naturally when there's lots of ambiguity people are going to want to not make decisions because they don't want to make the wrong decision right but you have to make all of your decisions to ship your game so indecision is going to keep you from shipping and the most common problem is this kind of unspecified delay this is when people want more time to think before making a decision but they don't really know how much time that's going to take they might be waiting for inspiration right they might be waiting for something to happen that could help force them to make the decision but they don't really know what it is they might be afraid of the consequences of their decision so again if you're working within really tight budget or schedule or future constraints this can be a big problem you know maybe the person making the decision isn't really qualified to do it so remember you know the ownership list we were just talking about maybe the person owning art decisions isn't a very good artist or maybe your lead designer isn't familiar with the genre you're working in or maybe someone's trying to make engineering decisions because they were a programmer like 15 years ago but they don't really know what they're doing and so they they kind of just wait until they know what's the right decision but they never will or you know maybe you're lucky and it's hard to make decisions because you just have way too many good options right maybe your design vision has like eight awesome pillars and they're all so good you don't want to cut any of them but you know you have to to ship but you just can't bring yourself to like cut any of these awesome features right that's not the worst situation in the world to be in but it will keep you from shipping just as much as everything else so ironically i'm on a super ambiguous project right now but i don't have to deal with this very much because my project director has this philosophy where all decisions are easy if it's an easy decision you just make it and if it's a hard decision it's hard because both options are about equally good so you just pick one now i really like this because not only does it make it way easier for me to do my producer job well but also because it's kind of this interesting yardstick i can use if we're facing a hard decision like why is this one hard if all decisions are easy then what's unique about this decision that makes it really hard to make you know is it why does it not fall into one of those two categories of like either it's easy or it's hard so it's easy is it because both options are really good and you just you don't want to let either one go then you know you as the producer need to drive that decision and you can do that with data right you have to say look our schedule dictates like the laws of physics dictate that we have to decide this now we just have to pick something right have data be really dogged about this and again the more critical this decision is the more it's holding up your project the more energy you have to put in to make sure it gets made you know or is it because all possible decisions are really going to hurt your game or your team maybe all the possible decisions are really bad and so the decision maker is just super reluctant right um you know then your risk mitigation plan can be really helpful is there a way to assign numbers to how bad these decisions are right if both options are terrible maybe one of them is slightly less terrible and then you can pick that one um you know is there a way to mitigate one of the you know some of the fallout from one of the options and again it's almost always better to make the decision early rather than put it off almost always the longer you put off a decision the worse it gets or is it hard because the person making the decision just really doesn't have enough expertise in the area or enough information to make it right in this case maybe you either need to change who owns that decision or like educate yourselves right maybe that person can become an expert in this area you can have tools like play tests or competitive analysis like do market research bring in users have them talk to the you know whoever is making the decision um i was on a team where we were working on a game genre that the lead designer had never worked in before so we played a bunch of games in that genre like together and just looked at okay what makes these games good you know what do we like about them what don't we like about them if you're making a kid's puzzle game and your lead designer has only done like you know hardcore strategy games like bring in some kids talk to them about what games they like right look at a bunch of kids puzzle games see what is it about those games that people fall in love with and what you can focus on and then last as a producer you're in a powerful position where you can kind of propose a decision out loud right often as the producer you're less kind of married to the outcome of the decision because your goal is to get the game done so maybe you can say like hey we should do this sometimes a decision maker just needs to hear someone say it out loud and then respond and like oh i agree with you or no i disagree with you right now be very careful here because as a producer your job is not to make decisions it's to get them made right i've seen a lot of times where producers will kind of try to jump into this gap because there's an ownership you know a hole in ownership and it basically doesn't ever work out it's kind of a temporary fix it can cause more problems and it solves so be careful with that um you know you should be getting decisions made though that's your that's your goal so one way you can do that this is a backlog so basically you take all the features you want to make and you just put them in a list you order them and this is one of the core tenets of scrum so this this backlog actually is from a project i was on which was in the like too much good stuff scenario where we just had too many good things we wanted to make any of them could make our project successful we couldn't really decide so i just listed everything in order and i gave it to the project director and i was like look reorder this you know do whatever you want with this list you own it but it has to have an order it has to be sequential and then we're going to start at the top and we're going to work down so if your team just isn't making important decisions starting with a backlog can be really powerful if nothing else it's going to force you to confront like the sheer quantity of stuff you want to do and it'll force you to put some things at the top and other things at the bottom okay so in conclusion to ship your game you have to recognize ambiguity and you have to reduce it you cannot ship until you've gotten rid of all of the ambiguity on your project second ambiguity is something that negatively affects all of us and the producers who can deal with it effectively are going to be the most valuable your job is to make sure you have a plan that drives down ambiguity at the right time and lets you successfully ship a great game and even though ambiguity can cause a bunch of problems on your game you can fix them alright thank you so much for coming all right we have a bunch of time for questions about 15 minutes and again email me for slides my last name ends with an l not an i um the i've got some resources so again the game outcomes project you should definitely read uh gamma sutra has a bunch of postmortems that are super valuable there's a blog called ask a manager which is more about personnel management than project management but there's a lot of good stuff on there about team dynamics and helping your team deal with problems uh the gdc vault has a bunch of good stuff that i'll link to in the notes and then a couple of books also and if you have questions come on up to the microphones hi um my question is how can producers become subject content matter experts in a particular field in order to be more invaluable to the companies they're working for how can producers become i'm supposed to repeat your question become subject matter experts and be more valuable to the company exactly yeah i think that's a tough one because on most of the projects i've been on i have not been a subject matter expert so i was on uh like the biggest example was i was on a moba right and i i really hate mobas i do not like playing them i didn't really know much about them but i think it can also be valuable to come to something impartially right because i wasn't super invested in any of the features of the game i think i was able to be a little more just passionate about like hey you know what this is contributing to the game design and this isn't right you said the game design was about this but you're working on this other feature that doesn't matter um i think being able to prioritize well does depends somewhat on being a subject matter expert but not entirely i think as a producer the most important thing is to like learn how to learn enough to be useful as a producer and not necessarily to know everything there is to know about the genre right i think in some ways the more you know or the more you're kind of engaged with what you're doing sometimes you can be like a less good producer maybe that's just me but uh i think i think that kind of dispassionate and objective like hey are we getting closer to our goal or not doesn't require subject matter expertise now i know a lot of people on smaller projects they'll they'll have two hats right they'll be a producer and like lead engineer or they'll be a producer and a level designer or something right so in that case you definitely do need subject matter expertise but you also do have to be able to step back and divorce yourself from it and go like okay you know what right now i have my producer hat on and i'm making decisions based just on like you know return on investment and value to the game right i don't know if that actually answers your question but that's my personal opinion thank you yeah uh you had a slide earlier about having team members own certain parts of the project yeah do you have any insight on how you might go about trying to get people to take ownership of things that they don't want to that's a good question so yeah team ownership and how you get people to take ownership of things when they don't want to um that's a really tough one again i'm on a super ambiguous project right now and there's a lot of sub projects that need to be owned and most of that has been like the project lead just sitting down with someone being like look someone needs to own this are you in or are you not right are you in or out and if they're out then it's like okay you know what like you don't get to make decisions about this thing right this more junior person who isn't as good as you is willing to take ownership of it they're gonna make the decisions about it and then as the producer like have a structure that backs that up right um it's it's really difficult to have owners who aren't invested like those owners really do have to be invested in what they're doing and have like feel ownership over it and if they don't like they really shouldn't be owning it and yeah i've been on teams where someone was like well i guess i'm doing the monster design but i don't really care about it like i don't like this game you know it's like it's probably not going to work so you know yeah you have a junior designer that's like super passionate about the monsters like put them in charge you know and maybe they won't do like as good a job in terms of like decisions or whatever but they'll have the passion to be able to reevaluate like you can always change this or most of the time you can change the decisions that you make right so you know at least you do something and then you play it and you're like you know what this isn't fun it could be better and then during that time that person's learning more about being an expert in that area anyway so that's probably how i would approach it and that's how i'm again we're approaching it on my current project so thank you yeah hello uh you mentioned one-on-ones um and you mentioned that like sorry yeah they're doing construction so we're still alive um yes you mentioned people should have someone that they can talk to that they trust uh in in my previous team that i was on that was the uh the the head of the team but like it can be anyone on the team how would that work like if people go to different people to talk to yeah so the question is one-on-ones like does it need to be someone with authority on the team or can it just be like anybody right so i think it is important if you have a one-on-one with someone like you know let's say you're like a junior level designer right having one on one with a different like junior level designer is probably not gonna be as valuable as having it with someone who you feel like does have kind of some control over the project but usually people on the team let's see so i was on a pretty large team where we didn't really have any control right we were under a publisher the publisher was calling all the shots but it still felt like when i had a one-on-one with my manager even though i kind of knew they couldn't really do anything about the problems like at least they were listening to me so i think it depends less on how much authority the person has necessarily and more on how helpful it seems like they're being i don't know if that really answers the question but like the important thing is to be heard and feel like you're not alone and like someone is sympathizing with you and like in the boat with you and i know it kind of sucks when you just hear like well there's nothing i can do about that you know live with it but but just like being heard i think is the more important thing sometimes than actually even fixing the problems like there's always going to be problems you can't fix all of them so having a structure where you can kind of talk about them and feel like you're working through them is sometimes kind of more important or as important okay thanks all right yeah thanks for sharing all the information and all the insight uh i have a couple of questions you mentioned something about the witcher 3 uh yeah i just wanted to make sure which one it was is that the anti-chamber one or no let's see i don't link to it at the end here let me see uh sorry i will find it uh the question is which is the witcher 3 talk about uh feature ranking man i have a lot of slide animations all right here we go uh it is called from great ideas to game features i think and it was from 2015 and it was by the lead designer on witcher 3. and it's in it's in the vault okay yeah and the other one is what do you think makes a good game vision oh what do i think makes a good game vision i think something where so so like good pillars i think are like specific and actionable and positive so examples of good pillars are things like um you know like you're going to play as a wolf spirit and the game has a sumier art style right like you know exactly which game i'm talking about or um you know if you can sort of tell someone in two senses what the game is and they get that they get it and they're on the same wavelength as you and they're like oh i see where you're going with that right i think when you try to tell someone what your game is and you kind of spend a lot of time explaining and they don't really get it that almost always means that you don't really know what you're making or it's not going to be very good right usually when you tell someone and they get they're like oh i see what you're talking about like i understand right that's that's a good game division vision is something that gets across to someone and then they kind of like have the spark of like oh i love what you're saying right that's i think if you talk to someone at gdc and you tell them your game vision and they get excited it's a good vision even even if it's like hey i'm making a candy crush clone but instead of candies it's aliens right it's like oh okay i get it right you know it's not like the most innovative game but you know what i'm talking about right yeah thanks hello there's a couple things that you mentioned i wanted you to elaborate on the first one was the iron triangle you know there's three the time quality costs pick two and you said in game development we picked three but that's physically impossible so i wanted to elaborate with on that and also why do you feel that scrum is being used too much okay so the iron triangle why do i say we have to pick three when it's only physically possible to pick two and uh why do i think scrum is used too much okay so the iron triangle it's more like how far out each of those corners are right so it's sort of like okay how big is your budget how big is your schedule and how many features are you including is sort of an inverse one which is weird and then the size of those is kind of how much time you can mess around and and in a way how innovative your game can be right so i don't know if quality is really the word it's more how how innovative yeah and kind of in scope and then if you execute well on all of those then you'll end up with quality right you can you can have a quality game that you know has to be you know a racing game sequel so all the features are well defined and you have you know six months and no money right and you can still make a quality game out of that but you can't do any innovation so it's it again it's like you can't do that and innovate but you can do it without innovating does that does that make because in the triangle quality is usually in the middle yeah scope so you're saying that you do work with all those you can't fix those though because that's what when pick two means you fix accessories exactly which ones are fixed which ones are adjustable and then how do you have to work within them right and then the other thing about scrum so i know a bunch of game developers where someone at their studio is like let's do scrum i hear it's amazing and the thing is so another interesting finding of the game outcomes project is that what project management process you use is not really important or it doesn't really correlate to the finished game quality right scrum waterfall agile like whatever doesn't matter what matters is does your team understand it and are they using it well right so i think a lot of people look at scrum and they're like this is gonna change the world it's gonna be amazing and then everything will be great and it's not right so they put a bunch of time and effort in they change over to scrum the team doesn't really understand it and then things get kind of worse because the team isn't bought in if your team's bought in it really does not matter what project management process you use as long as you do it well and everybody understands it right so that's the important thing okay thank you hello while working on a ambiguous project have you ever had to work with uh developers and team members that don't work well with ambiguity and if so what would be your advice for dealing with that yeah so a lot of times when i'm interviewing i will ask someone like oh sorry the question is what about people that don't work well with ambiguity what do you do so one thing is interviewing just say like hey are you the type of person that likes getting handed a list and then just doing the list or are you the type of person that likes their management to be really hands-off and be like hey there's this problem figure out how to fix it right some people some people who are game developers just want to be given like do these 50 things in order and just figure out how to do them and people some people like working that way those types of people are not going to do as well on a very ambiguous project unless they have a strong lead that can kind of shelter them from the ambiguity and tell them like do this and this and this right so a lot of it is just hiring the right people for your project um if you're on a super super ambiguous project and you have people like that you kind of have to protect them a little bit um and like currently you know i'm in research we we kind of just don't hire those people because we know they're not going to succeed so it's kind of different on a big team where you have a bunch of people and you kind of like have to you know have to hire more junior people who don't really know how to deal with ambiguity yet but again make sure that they have someone that they can ask like hey what am i supposed to do right now i don't really know i feel bad like i'm nervous you know and have someone that that's telling them like okay here's what you need to focus on right here's what work you're doing here's how your work fits into the project everything's cool so strong leads is i guess my answer in two words okay thank you yeah how do you get uh designers comfortable with time box ideation how do you get designers comfortable with timebox ideation um i think data right so if you are a producer on a project and your designers just will not work within a time box then kind of all you can do is shove data in their faces oops oh no sorry i'm trying to flip to my last slide while i'm talking that's not great um so if you have data and you're like look this is our schedule right we have to ship by christmas or our studio is getting shut down right just re-emphasize that and again i think that's where being a producer and being a little more objective and kind of divorced from like but i care so deeply about what color the player's hair is you know like you're like i don't care we just have to ship and being that person kind of allows your designers a little bit more freedom actually because because if your designers are the kind that like want to iterate on stuff and really want to play around it's it's good to give them that space and i think you as the producer can kind of be like okay i'll be the one worrying about the schedule you worry about making stuff cool and then we'll both contribute and work together and there's a healthy tension um i have worked though with designers that just will not right they just won't and those games don't ship so update your resume i guess is the answer yeah all right how much time or let's see we got two minutes all right one minute okay hi so i had a question um how in a fairly flat hierarchy how do you get your colleagues to buy into your somewhat arbitrary deadlines i so in a flat hierarchy how do you get people to buy into arbitrary deadlines um arbitrary deadlines don't really work unless your team is bought in right so if if your team sees the value in okay why do we need an arbitrary deadline then it'll work but if if they just see you as the producer being this dictatorial like for no reason we have to hit alpha by march right like they they just won't listen to you because you because your priorities are different right they want to make a great game you want to hit an arbitrary deadline you really have to get have them have this kind of deep understanding of why like why is it important that we finish something right sometimes it's not i went to a talk yesterday um by the guy who did thumper and they worked on that game for seven years and he was like we were lost in the woods and it was awesome it's like we had the best time just like trying stuff that didn't work for like five years it's like okay like you do you man you know like but they didn't have anyone telling them like no you have to ship by next year you know and sometimes that works and i think if they had a producer on that project that was like no you have to finish you know now it wouldn't have been good right they would have shipped a game that was bad so it it kind of depends on what your constraints are if you don't have schedule constraints then don't have schedule constraints if you do though then your team needs to understand what those constraints are and why you have them i don't know if that yes it does okay thanks for the talk all right all right awesome um i'll be hanging around outside a little bit if anyone has more questions and otherwise enjoy the rest of the bootcamp thanks you

Channel: GDC

Views: 27,488

Rating: 4.9787798 out of 5

Keywords: gdc, talk, panel, game, games, gaming, development, hd, design, game production, producing

Id: 4DWdnoLosZ8

Length: 60min 46sec (3646 seconds)

Published: Fri Dec 18 2020