Officially, there was no press at the Leadership Forum. In part, we wanted to ensure that developers had the best environment for open discussion, but also we just had very limited seating and wanted to conserve access to members. That said, Gamasutra (who work up the street in SF) did “sneak” in to get some coverage of several sessions.

• Gas Powered’s Swanson On Managing Next-Gen Artists
• Gamelab’s Herdlick On Managing A Happy Team
• Epic’s Mike Capps Talks Team Building
• Gerritsen Talks Managing Designers And Creatives
• Bill Dugan Talks Publisher-Developer Relationships
• Torpex’s Fristrom On How Not To Schedule A Game Project
• Tim Schafer Gets (More) Creative
• Don Daglow’s 10 Surprising Ideas On The Future Of Games
• Seven Studios’ Yeast Talks Next-Gen Development Process
• Crystal Dynamics’ Creative Road Trip
• BioWare’s Doctors On The Power Of Leadership

Here are some quick snaps taken during the Leadership Forum. Apologies for the lack of quality – we really should have thought to hire a professional…

Day 1

Michel Kripalani (Autodesk) givens opening welcome as the Platinum Sponsor.

BioWare’s Ray Muzyka and Greg Zeschuk deliver the opening keynote.

300+ attendees fill the main conference room.

John Farnsworth (Destineer) gives his leadership lab.

Tim Longo (Crystal Dynamics) on prototyping.

Roundtable discussions during the lunch break.

Attendees networking in the stylish lobby area.

Tony Van (Ubisoft) on communication.

Jamie Fristrom (Torpex) warns how not to schedule.

Catherine Herdlick (gameLab) on getting caught in the middle.

Chris Natsuume (Boomzap) on working with publishers.

Kenneth Yeast (Seven Studios) talks metrics.

Aaron Pulkka (Vivendi) covers the challenges of outsourcing.

Evening Dinner Reception

Bill Dugan (Torpex) munching with Greg Zeschuk (BioWare).

Yummy stirfry!

Attendees schmoozing.

Kumar Jacob (Twelve:J), ?, Alison Beasly (Lincoln Beasly PR), ?.

Don Daglow (Stormfront), Rodney Gibbs (Amaze), Karen Clark (GarageGames).

Chris Taylor (Gas Powered Games), Mark DeLoura (Satori).

Othon Cabrera (Broken Reality), Hector Padilla (Tecnológico de Monterrey), Poochi Ramasamy (Nextwave Multimedia)

Rocking out in EA Partners’ lounge.

Day 2

Don Daglow (Stormfront) delivers inspiring keynote.

Mike Swanson (Gas Powered Games) discusses art management.

Trent Oster (BioWare) on sucesses with agile/scrum.

Tim Gerritsen (Big Rooster) on managing creative folks.

Heather Chandler (Media Sunshine) covers game localizations issues.

Mike McShaffry on managing engineers.

Bill Dugan (Torpex) covers the challenges of working with publisher producers.

Mike Capps (EpicGames) shares insight on building a great team.

Clinton Keith (High Moon Studios) on cross disciplinary team collaboration.

Tim Schafer (Double Fine) interviewed by Mike Capps (EpicGames) in the event’s more casual closing session.

All of the session slides have been converted to PDF and zipped up for your downloading pleasure.

Leadership Track:

• Building the Perfect Team – Mike Capps, Epic Games
• Leadership Lab – John Farnsworth, Destineer
• Death By 1000 Ideas: Managing Designers and Creatives – Tim Gerritsen, Big Rooster
• Managing Engineers – Mike McShaffry
• Managing Artists and Art Outsourcing for Next-Gen Games – Mike Swanson, Gas Powered Games
• Communication Breakdown: How to Prevent This on Your Watch – Tony Van, Ubisoft
• Caught in the Middle: Managing Staff, Teams and Executives – Catherine Herdlick, gameLab
• How Not To Dine In Hell: Next-Gen Development Without Killing Your Team – Kenneth Yeast, Seven Studios

Production Track:

• How Not To Schedule A Project – Jamie Fristrom, Torpex Games
• Agile Implementation – Trent Oster, BioWare Corp.
• Something from Nothing – Tim Longo, Crystal Dynamics
• Working with Publishers as a Developer Producer – Chris Natsuume, Boomzap
• Local Anesthetic: Painless Game Localization – Heather Maxwell Chandler, Media Sunshine
• Cross Discipline Team Collaboration – Clinton Keith, High Moon Studios
• Leveraging Outsourcing to Enhance Development – Aaron Pulkka, Vivendi Games
• Dilemmas of the Publisher’s External Producer – Bill Dugan, Torpex Games

Keynotes:

• Ultimate Objectives: Lessons Learned From Building BioWare – Ray Muzyka – CEO, BioWare Corp., Corporate VP and Director, BioWare/Pandemic and Greg Zeschuk – President, BioWare Corp., Corporate VP and Director, BioWare/Pandemic
• 10 Surprising Ideas for Leaders on the Future of Games – Don Daglow – President and CEO, Stormfront Studios

Due to a mix up, we did not get blogger coverage of  Bill Dugan’s “Dilemmas of the Publisher’s External Producer” session. Luckily, Gamasutra was on hand to cover several of the sessions and posted a summary of Bill’s lecture: IGDA Forum: Bill Dugan Talks Publisher-Developer Relationships.

For an hour Mike Capps, president of Epic Games, talked about building the perfect team and the audience paid attention. Capps has an impressive track record, despite being relatively new to the industry.

In 2000 he started the America’s Army project, building a team from scratch while maintaining operational secrecy. Following that project he moved to Scion Studios and, according to him, beat Epic at their own games with Unreal Championship 2. Scion merged with Epic in 2004 and Capps has since led the combined company as president.

One of the key aspects to building a team, Capps said, was visualizing success – knowing what the end goal is. While team dynamics and œculture were discussed a lot during the two day conference, œwhat we really want is to have people be more productive than usual and work hard on the same thing.

œWe want a team with unity of purpose and a willingness to sacrifice for that purpose, Capps said.

He noted that this sacrifice does not mean your family. It means that you must be willing to sacrifice the inefficient things that get in the way of that purpose. Namely things like petty squabbling, territorial behavior, random web browsing and random œresearch projects. He warned of tasks that looked like progress on the surface but didn™t help to ship games.

In addition to having a common goal the team needs to believe in you, the leadership. They need to feel confident that you™re always looking out for them and are making the right decisions. Leaders must not be perfect, Capps said, and, in fact, you can™t be. But the leader must earn their confidence. When mistakes happen acknowledge them and move on.

Building a team requires hiring new people so Capps spent a good deal of the session discussing the hiring process at Epic. It seemed a long and difficult process but, in the end, they came away with people who felt luck to be at Epic and people there were confident were good fits for the company and culture.

The hiring process begins with Epic™s HR department screening resumes. This is a critical time saver as Epic receives well over 1000 resumes each month. Following the HR screen resumes are reviewed by œexperts within the company, leads for each discipline.

Should a resume pass the expert test the candidate is required to take a skills test. One interesting thing to note here was that no one passes the test the first time. Part of taking the test is to learn how the candidate deals with feedback.
HR calls and does a quick screen of the candidate following the skills test and then the candidate proceeds to talk by phone with the experts in the company.

If they pass a reference check the candidate then comes for an on-site interview. The on-site is a large investment in time at Epic, with 20 or more people talking to the candidate. Given the expense involved in an on-site interview Epic tries to bring only the cream of the crop in.

The final step in the process is a background check. Capps said he was surprised at how many companies skipped this step, given the relatively small cost. It could save you from bringing in talented artist… but one who had stolen from their previous 3 employers.

Capps also spent a good chunk of time discussing how to reward your team. œRewards are dangerous, he said. œPeople will do what you reward them for whether it is the right behavior or not.

Capps talked about the œinfinite defect loop that can grow if people are rewarded for finding and fixing bugs. Or giving people a pat on the back for staying late, even if that, unbeknownst to you, is covering up for too much web browsing during the day.

To avoid this Epic bases their rewards on performance reviews, which happen twice a year. They base these reviews on both the feedback of the lead as well as a randomly selected group of peers. Ratings are straight forward: meets expectations, exceeds expectations or doesn™t meet expectations.

They pay attention to a number of key items, each weighted equally. Communication and teamwork are weighted doubly for leads.

* quality and attention to detail
* creativity and problem solving
* communication and teamwork
* work ethic

Inevitably reviews aren™t always positive, so it is sometimes necessary to say goodbye.

It was somewhat odd that a session about building a perfect team spent so much time talking about the right way to remove an unproductive member. Punishing unwanted behavior and firing unproductive workers is critical, though, to maintaining team trust. In addition, nothing demotivates the rest of the team like working next to someone who isn™t pulling their weight.

Capps suggested keeping the initial discussions with an under-performer informal, perhaps just a discussion by the lead to probe for reasons that might explain it. Following this it is time to make the process quite formal. Capps recommended a formal meeting with manager(s) and HR along with a formal letter, stating that the employee must show œimmediate, significant and ongoing improvement in order to keep their job. The period for improvement should be short – just two weeks. People will either do a great job and improve or they will immediately fail.

Putting this in such stark and formal terms might be enough to help some people turn it around. Capps said his success rate was around 60 percent.

Should you need to terminate an employee Capps recommended telling the team immediately. Being open and honesty about a termination is important to building the team™s trust in you as a leader. Most likely these team will not be surprised.

Capps ended the discussion saying that there was not trick to building the perfect team. There were many necessary conditions but no œsufficient conditions. Most often, he said, good teams come from good luck… but they can also come from diligent planning.

This session turned out to be an impromptu interview with Tim by Mike Capps with Mike also asking questions solicited from the audience. First off I’ll recommend that you watch the video footage if you can (when it is posted), because a summary of this interview just won’t do it justice. But I’ll give you a bunch of general highlights along the way to tide you over until then.

["Where do your ideas come from?"]

Tim – “Everywhere really.” Tim went on to relate some great stories about meeting people who inspired his ideas for games like Full Throttle and Brutal Legend. Turns out the name Brutal Legend came to him about 15 years ago on a bus after meeting a real rock band roadie and he was trying to think what the most extreme name would be compared the the more fantasy aspects of Monkey Island (which he was working on at the time). Thus Brutal Legend was born. ["Can't get more extreme than that."] Full Throttle apparently came from a story someone told him about their time in Alaska and hanging out at Biker Bars. These stories, once he heard them, were just stories that needed to be told.

["How do you deal with Creative Control?"]

Tim – “Well at first I didn’t, I tried to do everything.” Tim went on to explain that he very much wanted to have his hands in everything, especially writing, but over time learned [maybe the hard way] that games really can’t be done that way and really need to be more of a collaboration with the entire team, of course. He could no longer be a bottleneck for everything, it just would never work. He found that finding a place where the team really believes in what they are doing and trusting them to do great work creates better games than he could by himself. It was hard for him to let go of the details and he feels that there are a lot of leaders out there that have similar feelings, but he went on to say that it is ok to “just be a leader” and not feel that you are contributing to every little thing. He felt that he will never stop writing though, every creative leader should probably try to stay involved in one thing at the very least.

["What about managing upwards, how do you deal with publishers?"]

Tim – “Don’t fight.” In the early days of DoubleFine Tim would fight with the publisher all the time, upturned tables, the whole bit. But that sort of atmosphere never turned out right. Yes, he was fighting for things that he just never thought the publishers would understand, but convincing them of his side of the issue rather than storming out of the room is really the better tactic. A cooperative relationship is more important.

["How do you predict marketability and how important is it to you?" ]

Tim – “I don’t think about it that way.” Tim explains that they are trying to deliver something marketable as well as creative and original and that they really aren’t separate. It comes down to the experience you want to deliver, the fantasy, and you have to follow that direction first and foremost. You can’t ignore the market but no matter how the marketability may seem it isn’t even a guarantee anyway, there are plenty of examples of that to draw from.

["Do you write humor for your audience or yourself?"]

Tim – “Writing is like Improv acting.” Tim tries to understand the characters as deeply as he can, writing bios, etc. and then draws from that fundamental knowledge of the actors and then he writes freely from there. There isn’t really a goal to write for any specific audience, it just comes from knowing what the actors would say in any given situation. He often tests the humor out on people around the audience and in the old Monkey Island days it even became a competition of trying to make each other laugh and trying to one-up each other around the office.

["What could publishers do differently in order to promote creativity?]

Tim – “More blue sky prototyping.” Tim can’t understand why more publishers don’t spend even a small fraction of those large budgets doing more exploration of creative and original ideas. They are one of the few people in the industry who have the luxury of that sort of thing and it could potentially trickle down throughout the rest of the industry as well.

["What is up with the old man who comes out of your ear when you put bacon up to it?"]

Tim – “Makes sense to me.” Actually, he goes on to share a story that his wife told him about the way you get rid of tape worms. Put a piece of bacon up near your open mouth. Then the tape worm will smell it and come up and try to get the bacon…then you grab him! “You know, the old guy came from that.”

["What is the one piece of advise you would give game developers?"]

Tim – “Keep doing what you love to do and try to become the best at it.”

Tim is a personality that needs to be experienced first hand to be enjoyed and truly understood. So again, watch the video when you get a chance.

This presentation focused on the why and how of localizing a game for multiple markets/languages.

Why care about localization? Games now are more international than ever, with more and more profit potential coming from outside your initial/core market.

Global market estimated at $31.6B (PWC data). Non-NA sales for EA 50% outside of North America, Activision international sales grew 240%. Non-NA sales expected to grow to $50B by 2011, with
Europe and Japan growing fastest. All major publishers have stated international markets are a key focus.

Trend towards “simship” or simultaneous shipping in multiple geographies. But it increases development and marketing costs.

Full localization is often called E-FIGS: English, French, Italian, german, Spanish. Partially includes Japanese, Chinese, Korean, Russian, Norweigian, Finnish, Danish and Dutch.

Core part of game production. Often viewed in Production and Post-Production phases. Includes prep of local kits, translation, linguistic play-testing, bug reporting and fixing, content review, and more testing. Need to think about localization sooner in the lifecycle.

Sample game:

• 30,000 words in-game text – 10,000 in-game words, 20,000 words of dialog, all dialog subtitled, 30 art assets to localize
• 2000 lines of recording Voice Over, 12 major characters, 20 minor characters, 400 dubbed lines
• E-FIGS
• Est production time (best case scenario): 20 days to translate 30,000 words, 7 days to cast 32 characters, 14 days for voiceover translation, 1 day for asset integration, 21 days for Linguistic testing, 3-4 weeks for ratings (but only after 100% of content is ready). Total: 63 days for 1 language, 1 platform, 107 days for 1 language, 3 platforms. Linear increase for every language added.

She then described the “desired state” of game localization, with much more emphasis on pre-production (make code more localization-friendly from the get-go, review content to see if it will fly in the target countries, etc.). She gave an example of a game developer where the German translator was deeply offended that the main villain was named after a Pope and that several elements of the storyline were actually incorrect and might get the game banned due to Nazi content. This happened early enough in the pre-production process to allow for not too disruptive changes to the storyline and character names, but you can see what would have happened if the game was set in stone when this happened.

Keys to localization: technical (localization-friendly code, automation), process (scheduling, asset mgmt, testing) and content (cultural sensitivity, global audience, ratings boards).

Treat English as a foreign language! It’s a great way to keep it top of mind during the technical production phases. That includes supporting Unicode, double-byte and international characters, int’l date/time, icons instead of text, support subtitles, lip-synching, etc.

Remember international keyboards have keys in different places, so important for PC games.

Process: start early in pre-production! Make translators team members. Define process and pipeline. Catalog and detail your assets (including character gender, formal vs. informal language, manual, box text, licenses, customer support, etc.). All common sense.

Testing involves linguistic and functional testing and the ratings submission. Can often take the longest of any part of the localization process.

Content localization: be culturally sensitive (humor is very tricky, politics, religion). She covered examples including Ghost Recon 2 which was banned in
South Korea because of the story line featuring a north Korean general trying to consolidate power. The
UK rejected Manhunt 2 for extreme violence. In
Japan use of 4 fingers by a character is very sensitive (Yakuza reference, “four” is an unlucky number, and historically a 4-finger salute was considered an insult).

XLOC – localization middleware.

Question: games on the web and localization – how is that handled? Local ratings boards trying to figure it out, start with IGDA Localization SIG and ratings websites.

Q: any middleware solutions for font engine support? A: no, sorry.

Mike Swanson opened his session with a very cute memory: he had dreams of becoming an insurance underwriter! (I couldn’t help but think of the Monty Python skit for the Vocational Guidance Counselor).

Thankfully he got pulled into Games through a golf game and 18 years later here we are. Got his first introduction into managing artists at EA in Canada, and later learned more as an art department manager at LucasArts. LucasArts had the unique vision to train all their artists in managing.

What does Next Gen mean to an artist?

• Prettier graphics (normal mapped geometry, bloom, dynamic lights, complex shaders)
• Speed (push huge amounts of polygons, complex simulations on animations, physics)

Who should manage artists?

• Experienced managers vs. experienced artists: it’s really about combining the analytical management skills with understanding artists and the “art process”
• Specialization of management: studio art managers, art managers, art outsourcing managers, art production managers, etc.

How should you manage artists?

• Junior artists tend to over-identify with their art – wrap their ego/validation into their art
• Next gen assets take longer to create – giving artists more time to get attached to their art-in-progress. Example: 5 years ago it took 2 hours to make a cup (texture map and cup), now it takes 8 (texture map, physical properties, opacity, specular map, normal map, fluid dynamics if you can drop it off a table, water shader, etc.).
• Communications is key (just like the communications breakdown presentation yesterday). Acknowledge their creative process and training, different levels of passion by discipline, and establish a common understanding of what we are viewing and what the limitations and expectations and when “good” is “good enough”. (quote from George Lucas: “my films are never finished, just abandoned”- you can noodle for ever but at some point you say “stop”).
• Manage the process – not the art.

Managing outsourcing

• Artists fear outsourcing will jeapordize jobs, but the opposite is true: it frees up resources to work on more projects and focus on higher-value-added activities
• Artists worry about maintaining quality – response is incorporate testing into the RPF or QA
• Artists worry about the added management and workload – fair concern, hence the creation of art manager role.
• Artists worry about losing control – set expectations that you won’t get to stand over their shoulder, that it is a different way to work.
• Management is worried about cost, quality and schedule. Learn from
  Hollywood, where special effects and animation have been outsourced for a long time.

Factoids:

• 40+ game outsourcing studios in
  China, with over $35M in revenues this year
• studios all over the globe including
  United States

He also covered why and how you would outsource art but that was also covered in the outsourcing presentation yesterday.

(blogger aside: I suddenly feel very old…the entire presentation I had to push my glasses down low over my nose, so I use them when I’m typing but looking over them when I’m watching Mike on the podium or his charts.)

Questions:

Listed art management roles – do you see the need for art directors who are hard-core asthetes as well as managers? A: yes, a lot to learn from
Hollywood in that respect.

We experience problems with cross-discipline managing, but haven’t outsourced – does that dialog continue within an outsourced environment? A: when you outsourced be really focused; have your concept art and model done and they can work on the realization of the concept, not concept creation. Unexpected benefit: forces you to focus on getting that concept done and not be fuzzy about it.

Roadblock to outsourcing seems to be cultural differences – how do you deal with art that’s being created that might not resonate with your core audience? A: many outsourcing studios are hiring people from
North America to help bridge the gap. The other is don’t use cultural references anecdotally – must be clear. If you’re going to use a movie or film reference, you have to make them WATCH the movie.

Have you had a bad experience with outsourcing and if so how did you solve it? A: no, not yet, but I’ve been quick to pull the plug honestly and forthrightly if the level of quality wansn’t there. Work into contracts how you can back out, keep lines of communication open.

This session was from the mind of Tim Gerritsen, Founder of Big Rooster.

Tim started by saying his lecture had “a rather pretentious and silly title” – befitting a designer. He threw us all into bewilderment asking us to stand up, raise our hands, clap, and hop. I admit I didn’t really hop! But the audience pretty much complied, laughing a bit. Tim asked us why we did this so willingly. He told us “Because it was simple, we were all capable, and the instructions were clear.”

Ah ha – a short eureka moment – this is exactly what and how a manger should communicate to his team.

Here are a few choice quotes from Tim in his introduction:

1. “All humans are creative – we crave direction and focus.”

2. “If I told you how to vote or what car to drive – we’d have an argument.”

3. “Creative people like to impact the world around them.”

4. “Good leadership works whether you lead creative or noncreative people.”

5. “All management comes down to communication.”

He then went on to ask us how many of us have slept under our desks – and about 1/3 of the people raised their hands – he laughingly asked where the rest of the audience worked!

Remember that hilarious Terry Tate video, “The Office Linebacker?” He showed that to us and said “Nobody runs their company that way but geez I wish I had Terry Tate sometimes!” Me too, Tim, me too.

Tim introduced us to the “trust -> focus -> clarity” cycle, and said that “You earn trust by giving trust.” He went on to say that you should hire people smarter than you are, tell them what you want, then “get the hell out of their way.”

Here are a few good quotes from Tim about trust:

1. “Creativity is boosted by limitation. It is far easier to make something when you know what the limits are.”

2. “You define the box (the limitations) – let your employees define what is in the box.”

3. “Get to know your team – what are their strengths and weaknesses. Play to their strengths, and use your team to compensate for their weaknesses. “

Tim then took a short sideline to discuss some stuff he’s reading – he guesses that this is the kind of thing he’s supposed to do in a lecture like this! That makes me feel a little conscious about my lecture in the next hour – and it even turned out I got a question about what I’m reading! I guess Tim was right!

Here’s what Tim has read and suggests to us:

1. Made to Stick – good ideas about how to pitch ideas.

2. Built to Last – a standard, or even bible about how to build companies.

He went on to talk about trust as it relates to creating systems and processes that will help your company even survive without you – and while this seems like a career imploding idea it is really the right thing to do. I look at it another way – if you create systems and processes that you, the head of the company, don’t have to do anymore, you can do other more important stuff!

Tim also suggests reading Illusions by Richard Bach. Yes, this is the same author that wrote Jonathan Livingston Seagull – wow that’s a blast from the past. Jonathan Livingston Seagull! Seriously, it is a good book about self-empowerment.

Tim moved on to talk about focus.

He said the four most dangerous words in game development are “Why Can’t We Just…”- everyone is a designer. He went on to show us a television remote – one of the simple ones, then the Logitech 880 with 1000 buttons, and used that as a metaphor for overdesigning something. Tim said, “I want that phone for old people – the one with the big buttons.”

Tim said the same thing happens in game design – and publishers are guilty of adding things into the mix when they really aren’t benefiting the design. They don’t want Tetris, Tim said, they want it with HDR lighting, multiplayer online, and spinning blocks in three dimensions. Then it isn’t Tetris anymore and it isn’t fun either.

Another example Tim cited was analog buttons on next-gen controllers. The console manufacturers would ask developers to make use of the analog buttons, and Tim reacted, “Have you actually TRIED it???? There’s a gerbil in Germany that understands that difference (in pressing and half-pressing buttons)”.

Tim observes that focus creates vision, and shared team vision results in much higher productivity and job satisfaction. “We all like to know what the hell we’re doing.”

Something that helps focus priorities is knowledge of the business side of our industry. “We want everyone to be entrepreneurs – we’re not making fine art – we’re making commercial art. Everyone should know the company burn rate – get your team to understand cost impact (of changes and new features).” Tim showed an example of putting in a new weapon in their FPS – ½ month each for modeler, texture artist, animator, programmer, and 2 months to balance it. @ 10,000 mm this will cost $40,000 !

Other reading materials from Tim’s library:

1. Ogilvy on Advertising

2. The Foot Book – Dr. Seuss. Kid’s books are focused! Consise….avoid the licensed crap – kind of like video games. LOL.

Tim also talked about clarity.

“Be honest and direct (to your team). If their work sucks, they probably already know it! You are not squishing their soul. You are not killing them – tell them how they can improve. “

“Confront! Do it! The first time is the hardest.”

Tim observed that we all screw up – that’s how we learn. Always praise in public, criticize in private. And you should guard against becoming the harbinger of DOOM, always criticizing and never praising. You can’t have favorites – it’s like raising kids. Spread the love.

Other random musings:

1. Don’t hire just because you need butts in seats – hire the right person – even if you have to wait.

2. Don’t be afraid to fire. An ongoing failture can bring the entire team down.

More reading material:

1. Mythical Man Month

2. Toilet Graffittti

3. The Exit Sign (no really – it was just an exit sign)

And finally – regarding a subject clearly near and dear to Tim’s heart, Quality of Life:

1. It is a leadership issue

2. “18 hrs / day for 6 months SUCKS.” We don’t have to be the industry that kills everybody”

3. “You need to stop and refuel their soul.”

4. “This is a hard hard industry on marriages. My wife is a SAINT.” (To Tim’s wife – he really said that – cool huh!)

5. “Is there really a good reason why we need our teams working on weekends.”

6. “Send your people home if they can’t see the problem themselves. Go HOME – you have a LIFE.”

7. “It is not a badge of honor to be living here.”

8. “Productivity goes UP when you fuel your soul.”

This is near and dear to my heart, too. And I’m really glad Tim takes such as hard line on it.

“Let’s schedule realistically or not schedule at all. If we were forced to pay overtime, we’d figure this shit out in a hurry.”

My favorite question that followed Tim’s session was, “How do you convince higher ups that we shouldn’t work weekends?” Tim’s answer – “Vote with your feet.”

Way to go, Tim.

Presented by Clinton Keith, CTO High Moon Studios.

Since High Moon has started using Agile methodologies, cross-discipline team collaboration has been a hot topic. Clint addressed the Goals, Impediments, Solutions, and Tools which relate to cross discipline collaboration.

Agile isn’t about process — it’s about leadership. Its goals are reducing waste and making products (i.e. games) better, cheaper and faster. It’s also about collaboration and teamwork; the core of success.

It is important to understand that the people who make up traditional game teams — artists, designers, developers — speak different languages. They need to learn to understand each other, and a great way to do this is to bring them together. That leads to questions about organizational structures, which in themselves can detract from collaborative efforts. Rewarding your people because of their skills instead of their teamwork or collaboration abilities is fine, but can result in silos where people don’t need to collaborate. Clinton showed a diagram showing the lengths people go through in a typical organization to get a bug fix.

Impediments such as team size are major problems — sizes between seven and eleven are optimal, but most console game projects require 50 or more people. The schedules for all of these teams MUST match for success, but they never do. The small size is key here because it keeps problems manageable. The flow of work is another place where too many people and parts causes problems. Resource constraints, dependencies and so forth prevent solid progress and demoralize the team.

Another point that Clinton made is an astute observation about the overhead of hierarchy. Concentrating on roles and organization can easily lead to getting hung up on responsibility.

To solve these problems, a company needs to make radical changes. High Moon has an open floor plan where people can team up at will. An active work environment is promoted, and while it causes some chaos, it keeps people thinking and alive. Remove artifacts from spiral development process which reduce face-to-face time.

The Agile environment where teams have immediate focus (as opposed to the organization) offers a great amount of feedback for members of that team. People get ownership on the project, and they succeed or fail together. Anonymous peer reviews give people a chance to talk frankly about progress. Finally, keeping the team together whenever possible gives people a feeling of ownership, which is the most important sociological aspect of agile.

Clinton described a team building exercise where his team took a mountain biking trip to Colorado. He relates that the best way to get the team to work together is to save their boss — which he found out the hard way by falling off a path and breaking a rib. (Don’t try this at home, kids!) Of course, Clinton doesn’t recommend this at all, BUT it is clear that the team will learn together and bond together when they understand there is a common goal to be solved.

Play testing on games gives focus on specific issues — the team gets to see the enjoyment or disappointment of real consumers. This is invaluable since they give the kind of feedback that the team can’t provide

Solutions are many, but one of the most important is to clearly define roles in the company. What does a game designer do? What areas and responsibilities do they posses? Without an equal footing for all of your team members, there will inevitably be questions and possibly even strife.

So what is “Agile”? Clinton described different ways to approach an Agile development environment. Bascially, the goal is to add transparency to your organization and allow you to act upon problems. You can be the most transparent company in the world, but if you aren’t fixing the problems that surface, you aren’t Agile. Scrum, for example, comes from the sport rugby. It’s being used primarily as a software development tool, but it has been used in manufacturing and other areas. When it comes down to it, Scrum is a box of practices that work together — try not to break the way that they fit together.

High Moon has used Scrum as a development tool, but what about art and design? What tools can be used for those groups? They have found that Lean and Kaizen (“continual improvement at every level”) offer a solution for all groups. Kaizen assumes that something always needs fixing, and that improvement of the whole often requires a cross-discipline approach. The “Stop the line” mentality improves quality and makes life better for everyone.

Clinton discussed Value Stream Map tools. These allow you to visualize the flow of real work so that you can reduce waste and cycle time. More collaboration means fewer hand-offs, and the shorter path means fewer things in play at the same time. This process allowed them to take a 16-week cycle and turn it into a one-week cycle, that produced 1/7th of the assets. That’s a 44% improvement in output! Best of all, it was driven by the artists and designers and required no new technology.

In summary, every culture is different and while the prinicples are the same, you will find that some things work and some things don’t in your environment. Pick a metric to focus on and follow that — for example, the daily ratio of stable builds from the continuous integration system. Take that data and make it real by displaying it to the team, and give them a chance to improve it, and to take responsibility for the improvement.

www.agilegamedevelopment.com — Clinton Keith’s own Agile game site

www.lostgarden.com — Daniel Cook’s site for XP for game development

www.projecthorseshoe.com — site for the 2007 Project Horseshoe conference

Mike’s presentation was quick detailed summary of his approach to understanding and managing engineers.  It was a good talk, but perhaps too short to cover many of the points in depth.  I can identify many of the traits and signals that Mike describes in engineers, but I would love to hear more about Mike’s approach to dealing with those signals.   Sometimes a shotgun blast of information is good.  I’m sure many in the audience will be digging deeper.

The last slide dove into Mike’s take on Scrum.  Mike is a big fan of the daily Scrum meetings but the idea of a backlog scares him.  He prefers having the entire project’s task like scheduled out in Microsoft Project to insure they can deliver projects milestones and final deliverable.  If MS Project planning gives someone that¦power to them!

Tim tells the audience to stand up! They stand .. ‘Put your arms Up”, “Clap your hand” “Sit down” … why did you do that? Why did you do what I asked? I did that to illustrate a point.

Leading Creative People

* Is leading creative people different than leading non-creative people?

* Everyone is unique but everyone is human

* We all crave direction and focus

* Creative people crave the ability to impact the world around them – use that in your leadership

Creative people want to make an impact .

All management breaks down eventually to one thing .. COMMUNICATION ..

This is A Leadership Talk

* How do you lead creative people?

* Huge topic

* I was going to rattle off a bunch of psychological studies will focus on first hand experiences indstead

- I was an NCO i the Navy and led game dev teams both large and small for 15 years

* I’ve been employer and employee

- I’ve screwed some stuff up, gotten other stuff right

- I’ve been on the receiving end of stupid leadership

- I’ve been screwed too

It’s weird thinking of the military as a good example of leadership for creatives but in reality it’s one of the most effective leadership organisations in the world.

So, who the hell am I

* I’ve been making games professionally since 1992

* I’ve been a designer, a producer and an independent studio owner

I started Big Rooster early this year.

What’s The perfect management Structure for Creatives ?… cue movie … Terry Tate Office Linebacker

TAKE AWAY .. If you remember nothing else from this talk, please remember this cycle …

* Trust – focus – clarity

Once established, trust leads for empowerment and clarity leads to consistency

TRUST

* As a leader you have to learn to trust your empoyees to do their jobs

* You earn trust by giving trust

“The best executive is the one who recruits the most competent men around, tells them what he wants done and then gets out of their way so they can do it” Teddy Roosevelt

* Hire people smarter than you

* RH Grant – “When you hire people smarter than you are, you prove you are smarter than they are.”

Micro management is not effective.

* The creative Leader defines the Box

* Creativity is boosted by limitation

* Embrace the limitations

- Working within your limits is far easier than not knowing what those limits are

+ Make me a character model

+ Make me a character model in 6000 polys

* Let your employees define what’s in the box

* Trust leads to empowerment

* Empowerment leads to entrepreneurship

It’s much easier to be creative when you know your hard limits – you work within them.

When I give you a box of Lego and say make me something. If I say make me a car .. I will get a different car from everyone of you here. But I will still get a car.

* Get to know your team

* What are their strengths and weaknesses

* Play to their strengths

- Allow your employes the highest chance to succeed

* Use your team to compensate for their individual weaknesses

- Create the lowest chance of failure

What’ya Reading? no.1 – I recommend the following

* Made to stick

* Built to Last – successful habits of visionary companies – Jim collins

* Illusions – Richard Bach .. weird but check it out

WHY CAN’T WE JUST?

* The four most dangerous words in game development

* This is the death of a thousand ideas

* Maing your team understand impact of changes in focus

- Everyone’s on your team is a designer

- Everyone knows how to make your game just that much better

Everyone is creative .. everyone from QA to the top lead knows how to make your game better …

FOCUS – The Television Remote

* You need volume control, programme and on/off … you can do more but do you need it .. you get this Frankenremote .. you look at it and ask ‘how do I change the channel?’ .. cell phones are getting like this too .. games on cell phones suck, until they change the interface games will continue to suck on cellphones …

I’m looking at you publishers .. can you imagine taking Tetris to publishers today ? The Wiimote is the perect example of the TV remote .. you swing it and you’re playing golf ..and then you get this (showSixaxis) .. !!! sorry Sony. Have you played with this .. this isn’t fun. You gotta do this .. tilting motion … Stop that for the love of God!! I hesitate to call is ‘sucksaxis’ ….! Don’t slap on stupid features.

FOCUS

* Focus Creates Vision

* Shared Team vision results in much higher productivity and job satisfaction

* We all like to know what the hell we’re doing

* Making Your Team understand the impact of cost

* Entrepreneurship!

* This isn’t fine art – it’s commercial art

* What’s your burn rate per month?

* Does your team know that?

Your team needs to know.

* Get your team to understand cost impact

Example – we need a new weapon for our FPS!

0.5 months for a modeler

0.5 months for a texture artist

0.5 for an animator

0.5 months to implement it in code

2 months to balance it

At 10,000 USD per man month, that’s $40K. Is is worth the time and money to add that feature? these numbers are bullshit – to give you an idea.

Ask these key questions:

* What will the feature cost?

2. Will the player see it?

3. How many sales will it add?

Evaluate -

* If it will make the game truly better and create more sales then Champion it!

* It it will make the game truly better but would cost too much or take too much time, write it down for the sequel

* If it won’t make the game better, dump it.

WHAT YA READING no. 2?

* Ogilvy on Advertising – very well written -

* Read Everything .. Sugar Smacks boxes

* The Foot Book .. Dr. Seuss’s Wacky book .. if you don’t have kids read kid’s books – they’re awesome. Dr Suess is fantastic.

CLARITY

* Be honest and direct

* We already established tat you hired smart people – don’ insult them by dancing aroudn the truth

* It’s called constructive criticism for a reason

* Don’t be dramatic! You’re not crushing their souls by telling their work isn’t up to par! Be on their side. Tell the how to make it better

* Passive Aggressiveness- an example – telling one member of staff about another – don’t do it!

* Deal directly immediatey

* Establish precendence

- The first time is the hardest

- It gets easier after that

* Learn t work with them to solve the problem, not to establish blame

- “We both know you’re up to this challenge. how d we improve this?”

* Be consistent in how your treat your team

* Everybody screws up. That’s how we learn.

Slide of Bill Gates – he got arrested in Albuquerque.

* Praise in public, criticise in private

* Hire Mr of Mrs right, not Mr of Mrs Right Now

* Don’t be afraid to fire

- Many managers don’t like to fire since they see it as a failure

- An ongoing failure can bring the whole team down

WHAT YA READING no.3?

*  Mythical Man Month – a must read!

*  Toilet graffitti

*  The EXIT sign

Wait a minute .. What the Hell?

Quality of life is a leadership issue!!!   They are no old programmers .. or no old anybody any more .. people are getting burnt out and we lose them.   We don’t have to be the industry that kills everybody

We all have influences that caused us to want to make games.

What gets your team excited and motivated in their daily lives?

You need to stop and refuel their soul!

Does your team fuel their souls?

I don’t mean that in a religious sense

Rather, what are your influences?

Don’t lose  touch with those influences

Refuel your soul!

As  a leader it’s your responsibility to look after the quality of life of your employees.

Is there really a good reason why we need our teams working on weekends?

A fuelled team is a productive team.

No more burnout!

Send your people home if they can’t see the problem themselves.

We need to get better at scheduling and we need to get more realistic.  It’s not a badge of honour to work 80 hours a week – I work 70 hours but I haven’t worked a weekend in two years!  I went out at the weekend and saw air and stuff – it was cool!

My Challenge to the Industry

Let’s schedule realistically or not schedule at all

If we were forced to pay overtime, we’d figure this shit out in a hurry (that’s not an argument for overtime pay)

WRAP UP

Questions?!

Audience:  If my team knows the burn rate is causes a huge amount of stress – convince me its necessary for me to tell them that

Tim:  they have to know the impact ..  they don’t need the nitty gritty detail but they’re intelligent people so knowing the cost impact of implementing ideas is necessary

Audience:  How do you put your finger on what is going to sell units and what isn’t?

Tim:  it comes down to opinion and reading tea leaves.  Talk to marketing and do research .. talk to fans ..  Bioware did it exclusively of their publisher.  We know you can’t talk web stuff as gospel but it can be useful.

Aud:  so for those of us who aren’t in ownership of a company, how do we tel the higher ups that we’re not working weeends?  Any advice from yoru experience

Tim:  Yes, I left!  Go to your managers and challenge the expectation.  Speak to your colleagues and get support  – I’d rather have 5 good hours from an employee rather 16 crappy hours.  If you can’t convince managers and they just want to burn through people then that may not be the right place for you.

Tim@big-rooster.com

Trent Oster gave a very valuable and information dense presentation of BioWare’s Agile Implementation. As with every BioWare presentation you get a sense of how well thought out things are at BioWare and how closely they pay attention to what is happening with the teams on a day to day basis. It makes sense based on the values driven culture that we heard about on the first day of the forum.

The presentation was in three parts:

1. An overview of what BioWare did to adopt agile
2. The problems they encountered
3. What they did to fix the problems

Adoption
BioWare made great use of a coach during their adoption of Scrum. Trent brought Mike Cohn in and said that they benefited greatly from his classes. BioWare formerly trained almost everyone on the team about Scrum. Teams were 3-10 people in size. Daily Scrums were run by-the-book with stand-ups, war-rooms and task boards.

Problems & Solutions
Trent covered the five significant problems and their solutions that they encountered adopting Scrum.

Technical Debt
Technical debt is any technical work on the project that isn’t “done done”, which Trent defines as proven in the game. Addressing technical loose ends has been a challenge for their releases (multiple sprints leading to a demo). BioWare has implemented improved goal communication and allowed for the last sprint of the release to be dedicated to addressing technical debt.

Technical and Architectural Oversight
BioWare identified the need for their princliple programmers to meet daily to discuss the technical vision and goals for the team programmers. This addresses the problems of having programmers distributed across multiple teams and the reduction in communication this causes.

Long term scheduling oversight
BioWare has maintained a “waterfall like” approach to long term schedules using Scrum releases. The problem they ran into with this approach was that their long-term schedules were not maintained well enough to match the reality of an agile project. To address this, they have allowed for frequent revisits of the schedule and have migrated from a large schedule to “rolled up deliverables” that are more easily maintainable.

Clear Acceptance Criteria
When they first started using Scrum, some teams didn’t go a good job defining what would be delivered. As a result, teams felt that they delivered early while customers felt they undelivered. To fix this, they introduced several practices:

• Short planning documents for each feature are written
• Meet to discuss the end user facing features.
• Write it up briefly and circulate for all parties
• Set up a review meeting before the work was started.

Optimistic Planning
Some Scrum teams were consistently overestimating the work they could accomplish during a sprint and consistently missing their sprint goals. While BioWare leadership understood this desire, they wanted the teams to be a bit more realistic rather than accepting failure. They used historical data to influence the team yet still allowed the team to drop work ahead of the deadline to still get a level of success.

Conclusion
BioWare has realized many benefits of agile and Trent’s talk was a very honest and informational description of their adoption.

This session was given by Don Daglow – the President and CEO of Stormfront Studios, and led teams like the original Never Winter Nights (AOL) and The Lord of the Rings:The Two Towers. I’m happy to say that I know Don personally, and I was honored to be asked to blog on his keynote. I hope I’m up to the task!

Don started the session saying that he’s going to cover some things about the future – some things about the art and craft of what we do – and some things that are just very important to him: “what we do matters – we affect people’s lives.”

Don has been in the industry for 36 years! Good god Don has been doing games before anyone even knew this would be a business. He was doing this when computers would not even FIT IN YOUR HOUSE. Don’s got time on the big iron. Don, I’m happy to say, is my inspiration that I can do this job as long as I want to do it.

Don told us the secret of success for his entire career – “I was born at the right time.” Dang it. That’s not really fair, is it????? Now that we’re all born we can’t follow in his footsteps, can we? Read on – and don’t despair. You can.

Don went in to the meat of his session – the 10 surprising ideas.

Idea #1 – In Games The Future Will Always Embarrass You

He talked about Van Gogh, Copernicus, Buster Keaton. Their work was definitely not appreciated when they were alive, but after they left the planet to other places their work became treasured. This works in other media like books, art, and movies – but not in games. Don showed a picture of Intellivision Baseball circa 1983 – and well, you know what it looked like. Lots of blocky pixels that, when you squinted a bit, sorta looked like baseball.

Don suggests the best way to deal with that is “keep moving.” He showed a great slide of baseball games from 1983 to 1996 – and again, I’m sure you know what this looked like – every release outdoing its predecessor. Don suggests that some core ideas can endure – even the old stuff had similar camera angles (which he created) as the latest work from EA sports.

Idea #2 – The Future of Interface is Cultural, Not Intellectual

Don showed that the controls of an elevator are completely intuitive to us – but he said that IS an interface. We learned it, and it is now cultural knowledge. But now kids feel the same way about things like drop down menus – and it won’t stop there as time goes on. “Interfaces of tomorrow have 30 years of interface culture to draw upon.” He shows a slide with a child’s hand on a mouse to illustrate this, and wondered about what we can expect many years into the future: what will the PS5 be like?

Idea #3 – How to Become a Futurist

“Begin by being a Presentist: show up.”

“Soon you will be a pastiest. But keep showing up – because Pastists who are not also Presentists become Whateverhappenedto’s and cannot become….”

“A Futurist! – you should keep spouting stuff about the future, and since it hasn’t happened yet no one can contradict you!”

This passage is classic Don Daglow.

Idea #4 – Who Controls the Future?

Don suggests it is not developers – not publishers – not the press – not the retailers. He believes the whole developer-publisher blame game misses the point, because neither of us is in charge. “We blame the press when we are together, because that’s polite.” LOL.

Don says that game players control the future – they decide what’s fun, and we should release our hold on who gets to control the future and concentrate on making great games. He went on to say that so many original hits were accidents of passion, like Sim City. This game was something Will, et. al. wanted to do!

My opinion – Sim City was never about creating a billion dollar empire – it was about making a great game. It’s too bad our business isn’t more about that, we spend so much of our time justifying why our game will fit a particular target market and satisfy some demographic. Do that and you’ll get a game that was just like something that already exists – you’ll never get a Guitar Hero or Katamari.

Idea #5 – Why are there former game programmers, but not old game programmers?

Don says programmers want to get out of programming – as if they were going to be led off to be made into Soylent Green… Don observes that in the past there was a new programming language every two years and now C++ has been stable for 15 years. Don says you shouldn’t teach a technologist that they need to stop doing what they love to do.

“The microprocessor baby boomer programmers of the 1970’s will age….”

Idea #6 – In The Future Games Will Do More Good

Don showed pictures of Wii families and Guitar Hero – when they talked about their weekend it was more “we played the game” – not “I played the game”. These new games are bringing families together.

“A lot of us come from broken families – we have the urge to create something.” Don observes that we are all a part of a significant cultural change.

Don mentioned that when people walk up to you and say they enjoyed your game, “that never gets old.” I completely agree – I think too many people in our industry are so focused only on the last project they shipped, that they don’t take a moment to feel a little pride in the great works of their entire career.

Don created a game called Utopia – and there was girl that played it with her grandfather. This girl met Don and related memories of her late grandfather, and how playing this game bound them together in a way that never happened before. To this day Don gets emotional about that moment she told him about her memories of this game and her grandfather.

Another story, even more touching – or even important. Don worked on Never Winter Nights on AOL. A woman came up to Don and said that NWN changed her life. She was in an abusive relationship and her husband beat her – she couldn’t leave her house because that angered her husband. Instead, she escaped into NWN – and told people in the game what she was going through. Her fellow players convinced her to summon the courage to leave her husband.

“We can change people’s lives in powerful ways.”

Idea #7 – It isn’t Just Audiences, It’s Architecture

Don reminded us that Wall Street requires companies to grow to maintain their stock value, and he observed that this is bad game design. “Grow or die!” Most of the entertainment money is spent in the living room, and this has been true since the invention of the radio, Don says.

Don observed that this is why the XBOX exists – MS dominated office software, and dominated the den with the PC, and needed to grow. They needed to get to the living room.

“The future is going to be about the battle for the living room.”

Idea #8 – XboxLive with be Everything Live

Don introduced us to the concept of wide shelves vs. narrow shelves. In years past you could buy Oreos, but now you have your choice of dozens of Oreo products – like reduced-fat double stuff Oreos, . What was there before all those Oreos? “There’s a dead cookie somewhere crushed under the jackboot of Nabisco!”

Don told us that games are sold the same way – publishers convince retailers to take games they don’t want, like Attack of the Insurance Salesman from Deluth, in order to have games they do want, like Halo 3. Shelf space will always be limited – even in online distribution. “What ever the format is, you want your game to be noticed – most games won’t get noticed.”

Don told us not to worry about the demise of big retailers and publishers – the big publishers will stay big because they have financing, production, and distribution, and they will continue to leverage those things.

Idea #9 – Conglomerates, Conformists, and Consent.

Don challenges us, “How do we escape being a cog in the machine? How do you have an identity?”He says we want to do something meaningful, and even though big companies will continue to be big – we don’t have to be cogs in the machine. “As bad as things are (in your crappy job or crappy project), preserving the status quo can be less frightening – we are in charge of how we feel, our attitudes, our values, ourselves.” You can stick to that when all else seems lost.

“No one controls your creative commitment but you.”

You can be free from these destructive patterns. If you recognize your control, working for yourself and no one else, you won’t be bothered by this.

Idea #10 – for the year 2043 (36 years from now…)

You Can Still Be Excited By Your Craft After 36 Years!

Don showed us a sepia tone photo of Daglow’s Tin Shop in Nome Alaska, 1899. The family really had a tin shop in the gold rush up there.

Stormfront has had good times and bad – but looking at his grandfathers day, Don said that he realized his bad times weren’t so bad! “My grandfather thought he was taking a picture of his shop – but he unintentionally helped his grandson have a better attitude about his life and his work.”

“There’s this idea of unintended effects of what we do as game creators – we can’t comprehend 2043, we can’t comprehend tomorrow either! You have already done great things for people – even if you’ve only been in the industry for a few years.”

Don implored us to “Take this seriously,” something I’m sure everyone in the audience will do.

This lecture was given by Chris Natsuume – Producer on Far Cry (amoung many many other things), and founder of BoomZap.

Chris started with a great quote – “We are what we’ve made”. In the middle of his career he went back to business school, and discovered business degrees are very easy to get! LOL. Afterwards he started BoomZap. He admits that this talk will have an inde point of view, and said, “If the inde slant to my talk bothers you, then leave!” I like this guy already.

Chris said “every day is strategy day.” Create long term goals – your exit strategy – and how are you going to get there. He says you should share this strategy with your team and your publisher – it shouldn’t be a secret. He says too many people keep this very close, and discuss it only behind closed doors. Chris admitted to one of his publishers that he had cash flow and distribution problems, and wanted to know how his publisher could help solve those problems. Wow. I know people who would cut off their right leg before telling anything like that to a publisher.

Chris said that three groups of people are damaged after you ship a crappy game: your customers, your team, and your publisher. All this hurts your company. I’ve seen this happen – even a good game in an “easy” genre, like casual games, can make it difficult for you to work on anything else. His earlier quote, “we are what we’ve made” seems to resonate again.

Chris told us about BATNA – Best Alternative To A Negotiated Agreement. “If you don’t get this deal, what else are you going to do?” Publishers have high BATNAs: hundreds of teams, hundreds of ideas. Developers have maybe 10 publishers that matter, or you self publish. That’s not much.

“Make your story the whole package,” said Chris, “Everyone has the same story (we’ve got the best game, best art, blah blah), and they’ve always seen better stuff than you are showing – but maybe not wrapped up in a single studio. ”

Chris suggested you build a better demo – that is proof you can deliver. Publishers don’t finance that. You need a lower monthly cash-burn to be able to afford this. Publishers don’t want their money to go down the drain. Chris suggests you find non-publisher partners and trade services. As an example BoomZap didn’t have an audio department – and they found a studio that needed design help, and they swapped sound for design. All this improves your BATNA – your options.

“Where else can I get what I need?” – BoomZap is entirely virtual. They own a printer – but that’s it. That cuts huge costs out of their budget. I’m personally curious as to how many publishers will be cool with that – they won’t finance a AAA game with a totally virtual company – but perhaps on smaller projects?

A great quote – “What you think doesn’t matter – what you can prove matters.” This is 100% true, and you can take it to the bank.

Chris showed us “The Super Secret Pyramid of Development Contracts” – IP Ownership, Royalty %, and Prepaids. He said you get to pick two. I think this is generally true, but there can be exceptions. I think the best thing to do is try to be realistic and understand the business realities on the other side of the table. Chris went on to say more about this…

“Your great demo will help a publisher believe their slice of the royalties will be bigger”, Chris was happy to admit that Boomzap has mastered the triangle. Boomzap wanted to keep IP, but in exchange gave the publisher first rights for a sequel. This gave them long term investment potential – when the game went big they would come along for the ride.

Chris went on to explain who pays for what when and that publishers insure project costs. Their job is to worry about whether their risks will be realized or if the project will be successful. Publishers can cancel a project at any time – they want to know as soon “cheaply” as possible if this is an investable project. He suggests show them what the game is going to be like as early as possible. It turns out this is an incredibly good idea both for the investment, and the game! It is a waste of time to work on something for a long time that is no good.

Chris talked about what happens when it goes bad – you are more likely to be influenced by the termination clauses. Concentrate on termination WITH cause and termination WITHOUT cause. On the WITHOUT cause – you should walk away with all the milestones up to date – the IP – and ability to resell it. Regarding the WITH cause, “You screwed up and we’re going to nail you to the wall…” Make it very hard for them to engage that – and you should do so by having clear milestone definitions that are achievable.

“Remember”, Chris says, “GROSS and NET have no pure legal meaning. They must be defined. If you can’t tell me how each deduction happens then take it out of the contract.” I’ve seen this done in practice with an actual example of gross and net calculations in a supporting document attached to the contract – get that if you can. Chris mentions that the deductions for marketing costs are particularly hard to nail down – make sure they do nail it down.

Chris said that “All reputable publishers allow an audit. Every person I have ever talked to that has audited a publisher has made money.” Don’t worry about getting them angry with your request for an audit – this isn’t personal, it is good business practice.

Chris told all small inde developers out there that their contract might be worthless. There may be legal recourses, but no practical ones. Publishers can afford long court battles, and you can’t. Consider carefully who you do business with. Chris plugged Big Fish a little and told us that they are incredibly honest and open. This kind of information if incredibly important, and I hope that everyone spreads the word about good business partners. It’s probably better to remain silent about bad business partners – just use the “Thumper Rule” – if you can’t say anything nice don’t say anything at all.

Chris reminds us that negotiation does not end when you sign a contract – it will be a daily effort. Microsoft or EA will not change strategy to help an inde developer.

The publisher becomes your new partner, “In Sort of a Gay Partner Sense”, Chris mused. All marriages are work – Chris says his relationship with his publisher causes more stress than his actual marriage! When problems crop up, “tell me how we fix this together” – focus on problems not people – never ever ever talk about the contract – talk about the relationship. Treat your game just like you are raising a child together.

Chris said that developers are paid to find solutions, not just work to a spec. This is why we are allowed to do what we do, and retain benefits of our work. When a publisher comes to you and says, “I don’t like it, fix it” – you should step up and fix it. That’s what professional game developers do.

A big theme in Chris’s lecture was “Honesty pays.” Publishers have been lied to more than anyone on earth, and they have a very sensitive BS meter. He said that everything you hide or obscure works against you. I completely agree – you can’t ever lie, bluff, cheat or steal in this business – it is way too small to get away with that and ever work again.

On that note – Chris said that you can withhold certain information or disclose information in a manner best fitting your situation. I completely agree with this and I can give an example. When you pitch a game you shouldn’t mention all the warts and problems first – mention the innovation, the creative, the fun, and the possibilities of creating a new dynasty. Once the “love connection” is made – find the right time to disclose more information, because they’ll be in a frame of mind to work on the problems together.

Chris wanted us to know that the publisher’s producer is there to help you – his career is dependent on you to succeed. Talk to them every week – and email every day. Boomzap sends daily build info – and they may get bored with it but it is always there to answer questions and concerns. For those people who work on big games, Chris did daily builds on Far Cry so you can do it too.

Chris got a good laugh when he suggested you “do business drunk – it really helps.” Chris asks them about themselves – their structure, who’s pissing them off lately, etc. Sometimes this information can really help you navigate the sometimes complex political landscape of a publisher.

A few other interesting quotes from Chris:

1. “Do everything you say you will. Also – don’t say you will do something if you aren’t sure.”

2. “My emails look like they are written for children, there are so many pictures in them.”

3. Details matter – check your emails for spelling errors – what image do you have as your MSN messenger icon???? No naked girls – it’s unprofessional.

He also mentioned a few games publishers play:

1. Back end balloon payments

2. Cross-collateralization

3. Vague descriptions of milestones

4. Slow or byzantine reporting

5. “The Friendly Phone Call” – there’s no official record

6. Last minute contract changes – legal can totally change stuff.

7. “Word of Mouth Changes” – forget about the milestone!

8. Prepaid add-ons – fly down and talk to us – we’ll do that in house…..

At the very end of his lecture Chris gave some truly excellent advice – “Until you have the first check – not the contract – it’s all just talk.” Take that one to heart, he’s absolutely right.

As a general rule, I tend to avoid anything having to do with potpourri. This session proved to be a pleasant exception. Heather Chandler (Media Sunshine), Jamie Fristrom (Torpex Games), Tim Longo (Crystal Dynamics) and Trent Oster (Bioware) spent an hour answering questions from the audience on a variety of production topics.

On Scrum and other Agile methodologies…

“Agile is great when smart, motivated teams are given good direction and goals. On the other hand, it can also be a trainwreck,” said Oster. “I have seen a two fold increase in productivity when the team is really engaged. They also really start to work as a team. There’s no more blame for things as ‘a programming issue’ or an ‘art issue.’ It becomes ‘our issue’ and the team fixes it.”

“Feature development has been easy to tackle with scrum,” Longo said. “Location or level design have been harder to implement with Scrum since everything depends on them being done.”

On the increasing demands of content in next-gen games…

“Historically 100% of the team could generate the quality of assets we needed. The bar is now so incredibly high that maybe only 25% of the artists on the team can meet our needs because of the high fidelity,” said Oster. “We almost end up with a ‘finishing team’ that can take it all to that high level. The rest of the creators can move on to another project while ‘The Finishers’ stick around to polish.”

On outsourcing…

“It’s important to have someone go and work with partners face-to-face. You can’t just hand things off and hope that it comes back right,” Longo said. “Just spend some time and money and make those visits occasionally.”

“Another point,” Oster said, “is that if you don’t know what you want… you’re not going to get it. And even if you really do know what you want you might get it.”

On dealing with junior people…

“One thing I’ve found is that you definitely need to try and pair junior and senior people,” Chandler suggested. “Try and create a mentoring relationship. Don’t forget, though, that the senior staff want to continue to grow, too. Be sure they get training and materials that they need to grow.”

“It’s a good idea to let people do their own scheduling. New guys can take a lot longer to get something done than the older guys,” Fristrom said.

On managing the requirements of the three current platforms…

“Unfortunately there are lots of ports just riding on the success of the Wii platform. I’d really encourage people to spend an extra 20% to polish and make the game special on the Wii,” Longo suggested. “Make it a Wii game, not just a port.”

“You really need to pick one of the three platforms to lead on. In many ways I would encourage you to pick the most painful platform to develop on,” Oster said.

The audience whispered, “PS3.”

“Another thing to note is that the submission process on each platform is different. It’s really important to have someone who is an expert on each submission process, even if you have one platform that is the lead for development,” said Chandler. “Both Microsoft and Sony offer lots of use cases on how to deal with things.”

Playing the role of contrarian Fristrom suggested that, “maybe multiplatform isn’t all it is cracked up to be. Yes, you are selling into more platforms but if you focus on just a single platform you are going to be spending all of your resources on making a better game instead of diluting your resources.”

Finally, on the importance of producers…

All on the panel agreed that production was becoming more and more critical. They were glad to see the number of new programs devoted to creating solid engineers and artists for the industry but discouraged that there weren’t similar programs for creating great producers.

“Production is one of the most transferable skills,” Longo said. “Film production is one of the best analogs. Someone from outside the industry can help you.”

“I think you’ll have success if you go outside the industry,” Chandler agreed. “The producer may actually be one of those people on the team who don’t need to be totally into games to succeed in their role. Their job is more social, to help manage the team and the process.”

“People drawn to games are all slightly… socially stunted,” Oster joked. “Maybe we’re starting out with damaged goods. I’d like to look outside of the industry.”

“We also really need to figure out roles. Some producers actually do have a lot of creative input,” Chandler suggested. “A producer at Ubisoft is different than a producer at EA. We need to figure out the exact skills needed and then go and get people who are excited about that.”

I was very impressed with the first day of the forum. Plenty of great talks on leadership & production with a very focused group of attendees.

Every one of the ~six talks I have been to has raised the topic of agile in a positive light. One of the most encouraging comments that I have heard was from Trent Oster from BioWare who said that the internal BioWare teams using Scrum show a 2 to 2.5 times improved productivity.

The “Leadership in an Agile Environment” roundtable was very crowded and lively. It was great to hear that their are many common solutions to the common problems that face agile adopters (mostly Scrum). Among those are publisher relationships and the confusion about long-term planning.

One interesting thing to hear about is the topic of how much a team should change the Scrum practices up front. I hear a lot of comments like “we’re doing a hybrid of Scrum and Waterfall”. This seems to be a necessary phase for many company environments, but to me the jury is still out on how effective this is in the long run versus adopting full Scrum practices from the start and modifying them after they have been mastered.

Some observations:

• The lack of full Scrum adoption seems to cause some disgruntlement among the people who are enthusiastic about it.
• Many teams adopting Scrum don’t send at least one person through certification.
• Teams that adopt full Scrum from the start have a great deal of success, but it requires someone in charge to champion the cause.
• How design and art fit into Scrum is a point of contention.
• “New Scrum fanatics” can turn people off with their fanaticism.
• Some folks on the team firmly oppose agile from the start. “It’s the latest management fad” they say.
• Adopting Scrum halfway into a project creates lots of problems, but everyone who experienced these problems are excited to apply Scrum to the next new project.

Overall this forum has been a great experience. We’ve passed the tipping point on agile game development. There’s already talk about an “agile track” next year or even a separate agile forum.

Well done IGDA!
Clint

The 4pm Production session featured Aaron Pulkka, Sr. Director Outsourcing, Vivendi Games, discussing the pros and cons of using outsourcing in games production. The focus was predominantly on art production outsourcing, though the general discussion elements certainly apply to most kinds of outsourcing games producers and studios can leverage.

Aaron brought a view from both sides as both a vendor and client (which coincidentally works for me too because I’ve been both a consultant and a client in my previous life). He also positioned his pitch as “advanced common sense” (taken from David Allen’s “Getting Things Done”)

Outsourcing is a result of the continued evolution of game development towards increased complexity requiring multiple teams of specialists. Aaron’s first experience was with Sony 9 years ago, which he characterized as “a failure”, with underspecified requirements and insufficient due diligence on the outsourcing vendor were the key reasons.

He used his subsequent experience with a physical pod game simulator developed for the Sony Metreon in San Francisco as an example of “success”, crediting a more rigorous process:

• Prototype
• RFP
• Due diligence – can the vendor do it?
• Contract
• Updated prototype
• Production plan
• Production in batches
• Delivery and assistance with installation
• Integration

(On a side note, the Sony

Metreon experiment overall was a bit of a dud, as described in wikipedia here, with Sony selling the property to Westfield, owners of the nearby Westfield Mall.)

Aaron then went on to describe general outsourcing types:

• Platform adaptations – e.g. outsourcing from one platform to another (console), middleware (physics engines, etc.)
• Localization (translation, etc.)
• Art outsourcing (cinematics) – most of the industry’s focus and where his talk focused on

Expected benefits considered: control costs, increased production capacity and efficiency, leverage highly-skilled talent pools without hiring them or having them sit idle during pre/post-production.

Risks: unreliable vendors, insufficient resources, low quality, bait-and-switch (such as switching staff or sudden increase in cost), lack of IP protection, high overhead (could negate any cost savings), time and language differences

He then used Thomas M. Koulopoulos: “Smartsourcing” as the basis for a major chunk of the remaining presentation, which went by rather densly and rather quickly I’m afraid. He described what “smartsourcing” is vs. “outsourcing”, the implication being the latter is tainted with simplistic visions of ruthless globalization and cost-cutting.

• Not about economies of scale, but of scope (not exactly sure what he meant here, especially when he said “looking at projects more holistically”. If he meant that smart outsourcing looks at leveraging all comparative advantages rather than absolute cost advantages a-la Ricardian economics, then I agree).
• Not about ownership, it’s about partnership (again, needs more definition otherwise it veers dangerously close to consultant-speak…I should know, I used to be one!)
• It’s not just about cost-cutting, it’s about innovation (which jives very well with IBM’s own experiences showing innovation is moving to “collaborative innovation” and away from “the entrepreneurial tinkerer” to partnerships because it’s getting too expensive and complex to do it on your own anymore. The Cell chip developed by Toshiba, Sony and IBM is just such an example.)
• It’s not about cheap labor, it’s about smart, educated workers. Aaron disagrees with a recent Gamasutra article claiming it’s “about a race to the bottom”. I agree with him that the media, China-bashers and isolationist elements tend to overemphasize that element. While it certainly has happened, smart people eventually figure out pure price or cost is never a sustainable advantage; even India is now outsourcing back to the US and China’s wages have risen enough that Vietnam is competing.
• It’s not episodic, it’s here to stay – not a passing fad. Complex games are going to continue requiring external partnerships to be successful.

The next section was on “getting started”.

• Forecasting and preparation
  • looking for what work to farm out vs. what to keep in house.
  • Close collaboration with art department is critical (they may surprise you on what they want to keep!)
• Vendor selection – used process described in “The Black Book of Outsourcing”, Douglas Brown
  • gather info
  • define objectives and evaluation criteria
  • prepare RFP
  • evaluate bids
    • reliability is the most important criteria when clients were surveyed on what they look for in an outsourcing vendor; without that all other criteria are irrelevant: ability to deliver, stable infrastructure, consistent communication, minimization of sub-contracting
    • 2^nd was technical capabilities
    • 3^rd was trust – used the Prisoner’s Dilemma to illustrate how entering cooperative relationships rather than self-interested ones are better in the long-haul. Trust and cooperative negotiation has been covered really well in a class I recently took on cooperative negotiations based on the book “Getting to Yes”. I highly recommend it as a great adjunct to this session…I should mention it to Aaron as well. The most interesting experience in the class was how quickly relationships can devolve into mutually assured destruction, even when cooperation would yield better results individually and in toto
• • • 4^th was cost & value
• Outsourcing production
  • Issue RFP – the more detailed, the better
  • Look at a staged approach – start small and ramp up
  • Clear feedback is important, particularly for rework that might pop up in future iterations

Aaron then covered common mistakes:

• Know when NOT to outsource – team not ready, requirements not clear, insufficient infrastructure to support a vendor, never your core competencies
• Uncover hidden costs – time to integrate outsourced assets, level of completeness, changes in scope/specs
• Verify data security/protection measures – don’t forget the human element, not just technology
• Track key personnel – watch for staff rollovers
• Care about cultural differences
  • Used the example of McDonalds making their offerings more culturally specific (green bean pies in
    China, vegetarian in
    India)
• Start locally or in a similar cultural/language background if you have limited experience with outsourcing. When ready to consider
  China or
  India, he suggested we read the book “The Elephant and the Dragon” by Robyn Meredith – describes the differences between the two countries, each with their own strengths and weaknesses.

Overall, Aaron’s presentation brought back a lot of memories of when I was a consultant. Being on the “agency side” (as they say in the Advertising world) was a real challenge. The Games industry can certainly benefit from the years of experience other industries have gathered from outsourcing; there’s no need for games developers and publishers to reinvent the wheel here.

Questions from the audience:

• On SW development side we run into challenges in non-compliance – ask for a document that certifies the vendor is site-compliant; been cases where the BSA raided vendors and seized the partially developed assets on non-compliant SW
• Large audio production outsourcing company – how do we control producers asking for very high quality with very low turnaround times or expected price? Answer: From previous presentation, instead of saying “no”, say “why not?” then walk through what would be realistic and what isn’t – be clear, honest, open about what you think is feasible.
• Follow-up: small outsourcing narrative firm – how do we change paradigm for convincing studios can outsource narrative and story? Answer: Will be very hard because most studios see this as their core competency. Need to look for studios that don’t see it as core or are currently too hard-pressed to do it right.
• Handheld developer with main site in
  Hungary – dealing with poor perception of our location and
  Eastern Europe, how can we overcome? Answer: there is no “one” eastern Europe, and one approach is to highlight how each area in the region differ and where we fit in – get focus away from your physical location and more to your competencies.
• Do you see a tendency for larger publishers and developers to have in-house or captive outsourced operations? Answer: yes – many are building offshore studios, mainly to deal with areas where they’re nervous about IP or security. Doesn’t see it fully replacing true outsourcing.

Happy people make better products.

Happy people make better products.

Got it? Good. That phrase was the key theme for Catherine Herdlick’s session in the Leadership track today. Her session followed Tony Van’s “Communication Breakdown” and often echoed lessons Tony shared with a unique perspective.

Director of Production at Gamelab, Catherine offered some interesting advice to many in the audience were are “in the middle,” managing a team of folks below while simultaneously serving the needs of the executives above.

Everyone in your organization, she maintains, whether an artist cranking out textures or an executive negotiating a publishing deal want the same basic things.

• to feel that they have contributed meaningfully
• to know that the game will be popular and perform well
• to have a nice time along the way

“We, in the middle, are creating carefully designed and satisfying experiences for people – both gamers who consume our products as well as employees who are creating the games themselves,” said Catherine.

She suggested four key strategies for achieving success:

• Listen Closely
  Gather information about and from the people you work with.
• Be Open
  Earn trust. Demonstrate respect. Lead by example.
• Establish and Maintain Boundaries
  Create safe, work-appropriate space to nurture openness and listening.
• Establish and Maintain Expectations
  Transform something scary into something thrilling, rewarding and fun.

Catherine spent the bulk of the hour-long session providing a variety of tactics for each of these strategies to help you, the middleman (or middlewoman), achieve success.

A few of the really big ones that stood out to me:

Remember when listening, this is listening. You don’t have to have an answer. Be honest and say you don’t know. (That’s part of #2, Being Open, right?) Or, better yet, answer with a question. You can use that to tease additional information out of the person you’re speaking with.

Your executives probably have lots of experience. Tap into their experience and use it to your advantage. Remember that they likely didn’t start the company in order to be a big boss. They wanted to create great games. By getting them involved your helping the team feel more connected to the company and you’re establishing a trusting relationship with the management.

When wrapping up meetings be sure to set next steps and then follow through on them. You’re setting expectations that must be met. When deciding on next steps have the other people in the meeting paraphrase or repeat your messages. You can eliminate lots of communication problems this way. (This would turn out to be a big theme at other sessions in both the Leadership and Production tracks during the sessions today.)

Be fearless. You are in the middle and have to be ready to challenge both the members of your team as well as the executives above you. You might be pleasantly surprised that both groups like a challenge.

Be prepared. When setting up or attending meetings have an agenda ready. “Game design meeting” is not good enough. Know what you are going in for and then be ready to set your expectations when you leave the room.

Follow through on her advice by listening, establishing an open relationship and then maintaining both expectations and boundaries and you’ll be guaranteed to have happier employees.

And, remember, happy people make better products.

Jason: Will keep this free-flowing and free-format – interrupt us and tell us we’re crazy.

So, before anyone interrupts me .. why do we need to worry about having high morale?

Mike/Catherine – Happy people make better products. (A show of hands in audience – all agree)

Mike M – Everyone knows the games industry is about passion for making games – this is what gets the team through the hard slog. The people will make the game better because they CARE about it.

Tony Van – create a situation where a bunch of people try and impress each other – trying to do better

Jason – is there a risk that this can be unhealthy?

Tony – Yes, when it is competitive. If teams are battling against it can be detrimental.

Audience: Along the lines of competition – how do you compensate people? do you encourage/discourage people to share compensation info

John – I would not encourage teams to share info on compensation. Competition can be healthy in short bursts – say in a 2-4 week sprint

Catherine – Yes, we do this.

Tony – It works best when everyone succeeds.

Jason – Morale is an intangible idea – in the military how much empashis on morale – John?

John – there’s a ton! One thing from my 20 years in the army – morale brings people together – when you do tough things to accomplish something – when a tight group achieves something unique they obtain a tag, we don’t do that in games but perhaps we should.

We shouldn’t ever lose our focus on creativity – there has to be some tension to achieve but not so high that it’s unachieveable.

Mike: I worked at Origin – one of the founders crunch mode! We had a club – the 100 club – people who were able to achieve 100 hours in a pay period – the club then became more exclusive – 100 hours worked in a week! We learned how far you can push creative people – we pushed them so far they destroyed the work they were doing.

Audience: Cohesion is a good thing – but if a team is spread out over a wider area, locally – how do you keep that team focused

Mike: Nothing beats face to face contact. With teams spread out in different locations one client has video conferencing – it doesn’t have to be complicated but it brings people together.

Tony: Team meetings – get people together.

Catherine: When you do have meetings ensure that everyone is there.

John: If you can’t get all your people in the same room – get them as close to each other as possible. When I was at IBM we had daily conference calls – at 7am and 7pm every day. Everyone got to speak – that’s what it took to make that project work.

Audience: If you have long hours do things like bringing dinner in for the team help?

tony – In crunch or in general? At Ubisoft we have a day that we take the team/department to do something fun .. going to a movie; playing ping pong – do stuff regularly not just in cruchn.

John – during crunch get people out of the office – get them rested – the last thing I want to do during crunch is hang out with the people I’m having to work with. Go do paintball.

Catherine: we reward people with extra personal time. And giving praise.

Mike: To keep morale up, take extra special care to remove roadbloacks – if their monitor is too small get a bigger one – don’t stress over the little stuff and be reasonable about why they’re crunching. Be specific about what you are going to achieve during crunch.

John: If people are taking time to make jokes, tape up people’s doors then you know morale is good.

Mike: When morale is low – then I think their emotional book is low. They’ll make complaints about some relatively minor stuff.

Jason: Are there more rigorous ways to measure morale?

Audience: At EA we do regular online surveys from the team that reflect the morale of the team. Questions like ‘how effective is the management?’ with ratings from 1-5.

Jason: What happens with that data?

Audience: We act on the information to make improvements

Tony: We do it on an annual basis at Ubisoft. HR then address the top issues.

Audience: How do you draw the line with cruch?

Mike: I focus my team on team-oriented goals. I often have to pull them back and ask them not to work 15 hour days. My first day at Origin stated mandatory 84 hour weeks!

Catherine: We recently transitioned one of our QA to projet manager. He was struggling to get some of his staff to put in the effort. He was getting nervous

Tony: More people and more time does not equal faster delivery. You can habe tremendous chaos by throwing more people on. Eveyone that works on the project has to buy into it

John: Defining goals reduced crunch. Be specific up front with clear objectives written dow.

Catherine: Set up the expectations – say to the team that there may be crunch in a couple of weeks.

Tony: Are you setting realistic goals?

John: If things are crazy for one week, easier for the second, then crazy every second week then you to plan better.

Mike: If you’re my publisher you’ll never see this .. for the developers, you’ll see an admission .. for things we have forgotten! We don’t know what they are at the beginning but they will appear .. eveyone schedules the project to the hilt .. put in some time reserve to allow for crunch

Tony: I say what if…..? What if the main guy breaks his leg? Plan for the what if..

Catherine: It can be healthy to feel pressure. Building a sense of collaboratio n and accomplishment gives you and the team something to celebrate. You might need to plan more recovery time between projects or milestones. At GameLab we’ll give people time to work on new game ideas, fun days out.

Audience: I discover that when you know your team, you have some people that complain all the time .. and there are some people that when they are down there are serious problems. You have to know your people.

Tony: People don’t just fall apart – there are always reasons. They feel they’re out of the loop, not getting the praise – this stuff is so easy to address.

Audience: Set a theme for the sprint and that works really well. What I found is being really discplined, isolate the team to do a sprint but I don’t like back to back sprints. Sprint for 2 weeks and then 1 week off.

Catherine: We found that when we swapped to Agile the team can forget the product backlog.

Jason: Let’s talk about motivation. There are two kinds of rewards – extrinsic and intrinsic. Thoughts?

Mike: I know what not to do! I hope this practice is being extinguished in the world – don’t give employee of the month/year awards! They are political and stupid. At Origin, everyone who got one of those awards wasn’t there a year later.

John: For me personally, the way I get motivated I enjoy control over a situation. If someone gives me a project and responsiblitiy I feel empowered and motivated. Empower your people – they’ll learn and be motivated.

Catherine: We don’t have enough buffer to give over-time pay but we do want ot acknowledge that people need to be rewarded so we give more personal time. They have to request the time bt it seems to be working.

Audience: I work for a publisher and have rejected a milestone. This has killed the morale of the developer, what can I do to help them?

Mike: If you rejected the whole thing then it’s over! Rejection of a task must be followed with an explanation of why and how it can be fixed. Give them a path to success – don’t reject it and expect them to keep on working.

Catherine: We had a milestone rejection and it really hurt. But the publisher kept the door open, we did a redesign and have ended up with a better product. Talk to the publisher/developer as soon as possible – warn them ahead of time there could be a problem.

Tony: I agree – I always tell my producers to go back to the team asap.

Audience: Granting personal time off – that does cost money.

Audience: For anyone who lives in Canada, we’re based in Winnipeg so we need as many motivational tools as possible.

Jason: Go talk to Ray or Greg!

Audience: I know of a website owner who sets public humiliation as motivational tools – dressing up as a dancing tomato in Times Square .. do you think that works?

Catherine: We haven’t tried that.

Audience: We’re talking a lot about feedback. The guys this moring (Bioware) spoke about how important it is to take personal time to talk to the team.

Jason: This morning it was very powerful to hear about how Greg and Ray went about really worrying about company culture and morale.. eveyone has a leadership role to play, what have you seen in studios …?

John: Everything I’ve seen has been pretty much ad hoc.

Mike: I worked in a lot of different studios.Leadership was non-existant in some and deliberate in others. Origin was a successful studio but morale was not high. Given the chance I would always go for the deliberate path to creating good morale.

Catherine: What we all share at Gamelab is a desire to improve – to pull out leadership qualities.

Tony: Leadership is a state of mind. People at all levels, caring about making things better. Morale is people saying ‘we have goals we want to make and we feel good about ourselves when we make them.’

Kenneth Young kicks off the session with explaining that he’s worked in both development Hell and great environments but not yet reached Development Heaven. Seven Studios has given him the chance to experiment with new ideas. He quotes others who say that Hell is necessary to produce good stuff -and doesn’t agree.

Working on LOTR was the ‘perfect storm’ with plenty of things that hit him and the team very hard .. he and the team worked 60 days of 10-14 hours wth one day off.. he’s proud of the job the team did and won’t denigrate work done by anyone in Hell … but having worked in development for 25 years he’s learnt a lot of lessons and different ways to develop.

Ken approached game development with a non-traditional gaming background and identified three key items:

Iteration – continually making and implementing changes -

Feedback using the info to change/confirm direction – monitoring a process allows change

Adaptation – change over time; gradual adjustment with feedback and iteration ‘

FEEDBACK -

During work it’s important to see the results closely; surprisingly some studios don’t live update their assets – during production you need a quick turnaround – correct lighting on each platform has to be seen in the in-game environment as quickly as possible.
Asset Verification on submission – does this break the current build? (missing added assets referenced assets renamed or deleted?)
More sophisticated submission rules (too many polys) exceeded memory budget? missing shader? any tool errors?)

/In parallel to work/
Task, Bug, Proposal tracking
- Gig
- Export live data to MS Project
Entry and exit times
- Measure results
- Bounding data for Gig

Estimates should be done by the people that work on them – we use WAG – Wild Ass Guess – the information needs to be input, possibly Wild but can be adjested by the team when work begins. WAG way out.

We hate MS Project – it has bugs that haven’t been fixed and keeping information live in MS Project is a nightmare. However, pulling live info from MS Project is useful. Eventually we’ll produce our own tools and give up MSP – however, for now it does have some strengths. In my years of working with MS P I have found that using it as an output device is helpful. Using the projections on reporting and analysis MS P is good the problem is keeping that data live. It’s trash! (audience laughter). It’s a tool of data but for us the data lives in Gig not MSP.

* Wiki for collaborative feedback
- Excellent for inter-departmental communication
- Remember to capture and store ‘Lore’ …

‘Lore’ is bad … Lore is information stored in someone’s head – using wiki or another open forum allows all information to be shared

* After submission of work
- Tie QA together with software/design – I mean QA within your studio environment -
- ‘Use cases’ to drive testing
- Different attitude, testing as feedback not proof of delivery
QA Tools
- Automated testing
- Automatic builds
- Unit testing (source & asset)
- Reproducable builds (source and assets in version control)
QA Server for Live Games
- Immediate communicatin to softtare engineers
- Data mining and analysis of QA data

After Deliveries
- Post mortems after every milestone
- Hacks reported and corrected after milestone
- -//HACK: comment
- – Failure to do this produces cascading failures over time

Post mortems at the end of every milestone are much easier to understand and learn from.
Failure to track the hacking will cause tremendous problems – the more you can remove the hacks the better off you are.

Moving on to

ITERATION .. why?

* identify technical or production risks early
* understanding the essence of the gae
- improves over time
- should lead to a better game
- evaluation process becomes easier
- you will find unnecessary work
* Production in phases
- deliver
- evaluate results
* Your timing cycle will vary
- milestones
- state of game
- studio culture (is time to adapt?) build the trust to do more iteration

ISSUES
* Estimates are always worse in the beginning but will improve
* Communication with the publisher
- never describe iteration as a fluid and unpredictable process – the publisher will go into a complete panic
- expose decisions making
- transparecy of work and planning
- work as partners with understood boundaries

ADAPTATION – why?
* Our industry is still young and dynamic
* Previous success may ot have been because of your existing processes but in spite of them – not adapting means you will fail next time
* Change comes easier through adaptation

Doing full motion video on CD a year before Quicktime but we didn’t have the process right to get it out to the right people. Always be humble and look at the processes that are doing well and be prepared to make them better.

What & How?
- Adaptation is a collection of small process changes
- Stages
- Analyse existing processes
- Determine what should change and what should wait (prioritize)
- Determine what needs more evaluation
- Not all godd processes work for all studios
At Seven there are a lot of good people who are open to change. I learned that adaptation is not only small changes over time but the right changes. I couldn’t get automated builds going until I got Perforce; before implementing Gig we had a lot of producers collecting the data;

* Evaluate where are the levers of change
- People
- Circumstance
* Evaluate how likely they are to affect change
* Iterate on the changes

Management:
* Withing departments there will be different paths to adaptation
* Hold hands wiht management – work with them to affect that change
* Leadership may have to change
* Changing your team’s behaviours -eg. giving responsbilities to allow your people to grow;

Key takeaway – have the QA hooked up to one server that shows ALL the bugs – requires investment in infrastructure that will pay off. This can be a big change for a studio but delivers a much more accurate and detailed picture of how the game is performing is overall.

Kyeast -at- sevenstudios.com
Highly recommended:
Sarah A Sheard’s talk: Life cycle of a Silver Bullet
http: www.stsc.hill.af.mil/CrossTalk/2003/07/Sheard.html

First off Jamie was coming at this topic with plenty of experience from Treyarch and his new company Torpex and his confidence in admitting defeat on his past projects was a great way to open. After all, the title is “How NOT to Schedule a Project.” I was very happy to have that honesty and as he himself said, the talk was not going to be one of those overly optimistic scheduling talks where a silver bullet is presented that really may not work for everyone. So right off the bat I was hooked from that standpoint alone. He then went on to freely admit that there is a strong chance that we as an industry have yet to really find a good silver bullet, again a frank opening.

Jamie was also clearly well read on the topic of scheduling projects and shared quite a few examples of books he has read, most of the usual suspects. He was also quick to take issue with a common criticism from outside our industry that we have not yet matured enough to actually try to use these “proven” techniques from other industries. In Jamie’s opinion we actually have been trying to do just that, but he was making the point that perhaps games are just fundamentally so different that those processes are not a “drag and drop” solution.

Maybe there is hope though. On his newest game, Schizoid, he moved from the AAA 100 person team of the Spider-Man games to a small scope project with 4 primaries and 6 or so contractors and he felt that “finally, we can actually succeed at this scheduling thing.” As it turns out though, he freely admitted that that project is over schedule as we speak and went on to use it as a case study to bring some conclusions to light.

First off, there is the common concept within Agile development of tracking and understanding “velocity” and using it to help predict and schedule projects as needed. Using a great analogy of a tractor pull where the whole sport basically revolves around increased “drag” as the tractor tries to pull a sled through mud. Fun! He proposes that there is a similar “drag factor” that applies to game development and thus scheduling which has a direct impact on the agile notion of a linear “velocity.” This means that if this is true, then predicting dates on pure linear velocity is not enough. I wish I had some of his slides here for visuals, but he was then able to show a few time-line curves for Schizoid that helped illustrate where the project stalled and how the curve changed to something that was very non-linear in the end, thus blowing their schedule.

Jamie then goes on to describe some things that contribute to this drag. Many of them are imaginary as they are things that clearly contribute but that we do not see or keep track of. Underestimated tasks, of course, would produce drag and thus trickle down to other features. Even simple things like forgetting some of the actual tasks on the table produce more of this drag. Tasks with diminishing returns like optimizing would be another one. So aspects of development like that need to be appropriately judged so that the drag does not become overwhelming. The final most interesting notion to me was the fact that work that is already completed also produces drag. It isn’t something that can ever really be taken of the scheduling plate entirely and as the project comes to a close every feature you have “done” needs its own polish and thus impacts every other feature because of it, not just that feature’s schedule. How often do we even think about polish in those terms?

Jamie also went on to support the idea that using programs like MS Project, which are entirely linear in the way they schedule, will never account for this drag and thus will not accommodate a curving trend. Using simpler tools and common sense may be a stronger way to schedule in the long run. Complex tracking and complex tools eventually result in diminishing returns as they often become out of date right as they are being completed. Jamie continues as he also points out that dependencies fall into the same category and are almost impossible to keep current and relevant without a major amount of time and effort with too many diminishing returns.

The final major aspect of Jamie’s talk dealt with time buffers. Typically the standard can be seen as around 10 to 20% addition to the back end of the schedule to accommodate the unpredictable. With his most recent project he found that by the end, where the game is currently, the buffer they should have planned into the schedule actually turned out to be closer to 125% time buffer. He brought this back around by making a point supported by data where this high buffer (essentially doubling the schedule) is actually accommodating the “drag factor” for their particular situation. Coming full circle, if drag is an x-factor that is often over-looked by a team, these sorts of buffers may work for those non-linear trend situations.

Jamie was clear that he wasn’t here to give us a silver bullet. He was, however, able to give us enough new insights into this extremely complicated problem to make us think about new ways of solving this issue and brought up just as many questions that we need to be thinking about with each new schedule we produce.

Tony Van, Executive Producer at Ubisoft San Francisco, presented this session about avoiding a breakdown of communication in game teams. He gave lots of examples, and the following points were made.

The top problem in most organizations is miscommunication. Here are the top ten reasons for miscommunication:
#1 No concept of communication

Understand that communication is EVERYBODY’S responsibility, especially yours.

#2 Unclear goals and priorities

Clear goals state WHY you are doing something, and what is required for success. Be SMART:

Specific (well defined, measurable, prioritized)

Motivated (team wants to achieve it)

Agreed upon (all stakeholders on board)

Realistic (possible with identified resources, knowledge and time)

Trackable (validate performance during completion)

#3 Assuming a definition

Terms are the foundation for discussing and planning.

Document your terms clearly at the start.

Always question term definitions, and get them documented.

#4 No frame of reference

From the beginning, your “vision” requires a clear frame of reference.

Reference helps get everyone on the ‘same page’ fast

• Gives a tremendous amount of context immediately
• Allows discussion of what others like and don’t like
• Mix and match with other references
• Important for original IP’s and franchises alike

#5 What is “good enough”?

Defined “exit criteria” of subjective and creative ideas is difficult but required — major problems come at this time.

Deliverables must use the SMART exit criteria:

• Implementers – how they will achieve their results
• team leads – verify that results are achieved, point out why they are not
• publishers – state why the delivery does (or does not) meet the exit criteria

Subjective deliverables add the following requirements:

• Show it to your target audience for expectation
• Review their feedback
• Iterate to get closer to their expectation of the goal

#6 Someone is “Out of the Loop”

The more people in the loop, the more likely someone is out of the loop.

Three basic methods of clear communication (from The Mythical Man-Month):

• Workbook (formal project documentation)
• Meetings (regular team meetings)
• Informal (face to face, notes, emails, phone calls, etc.)

Communicating a single message, with the means to clarify and update it, helps keep everyone in the loop without effort.

#7 Bottleneck due to chain of command

At the start determine who has the authority for what decisions

• Determine Top Tier stakeholders for goal changes
• Determine Lower Tier stakeholders for goal validations

Clearly communicate cause and effect of delayed/countermanded decisions to Top Tier.

Defined chain of command prevents bottlenecks or “rescinding orders.”

#8 One way communication

We don’t all understand the same way. Be sure your audience is understanding you based on the different ways — learn more about psychology of your team mates. Potentially incorportate things such as the Myers-Briggs personality test into your organization.

Just because you said it/sent it, that doesn’t mean that the message was understood. You must always validate your message.

Learn multiple ways to communicate to maximize your effectiveness.

#9 You’re not listening

Always listen to the other person’s point of view.

Try to communicate in different ways.

Don’t interrupt.

Become a great listener!

#10 Too negative

While the criticism may be true, there are better ways to deliver the message.

Discuss the specific error in the context of course correction.

Focus on improvement.

Be very aware of “priming” (the psychological effect of the environment on people’s reactions). You can turn a negative situation into something much better if you bring the right attitude to the table.

Tim Longo admited to a bizarre factoid about his past: he took a break from the games industry and went to be a forest ranger!

Tim’s slide deck was extremely cool and made me quite self conscious of my own deck for tomorrow’s lecture  dang it.

He likes to use metaphors and this lecture was no exception  the first slide was a map of the USA. “We’re going on a road trip, AWESOME! Think of the landmarks in the US as ideas.” We’re not told of the destination  we start with nothing and hope to arrive somewhere cool by the end of the trip.

He showed two methodologies in an Indiana Jones map path slide. The first was a crazy road that starts in the Bay area, winds around, loops, and ends up in the Atlantic. We start, we go, and we end up someplace. Not be best one.

A better methodology  detours should take you off the main track, you should experiencec wide meanderings, definitely some backtracking, and you will end up at a real destination. Florida, as it turns out! You want to be able to explore. You want to be able for your ideas to stand up to challenge  you’ll have the information to talk about it. Tim goes on to discuss how all of those things are possible.

Tim continued the “trip” metaphor by talking about packing up, finding direction, making discoveries, and bringing it home.

On packing up  Tim stressed that you should “start with a question or a problem  not an idea.” This really helps direct you and your team and helps ensure you’ll wind up at an answer, which maps to a real “destination” in his trip metaphor. On collaboration, Tim said, “There’s a trap with just one or two people trying to find a new direction” He’s right  you need representation from all the disciplines, and the results of your brainstorm will be better. He also talked about the concept of the “one driver”  and it can be anyone. This is really important  without it your “car” will likely run right off the road and go nowhere!

Tim talked about “The Camera Lens”. You filter your world through your camera  and the pictures you take, since they are important to you, create trends that become recognizable patterns. The better your filter, the better and more cohesive the aggregate ideas will become. But, as he was talking, I wondered how is this done in practice? In the past, my teams use a one sentence key concept that defines our game, but in Tim’s world this is a “destination”  and we shouldn’t really be there yet  so how does one find that perfect one sentence through which all ideas and details of your game can be judged? My take  Tim’s talking about using the camera lens to create a set of things that “feel” right together, which will eventually inspire the core values of the game. Once that is done you have your “destination!” Very cool.

Tim then discussed structured brainstorming  which is a really good idea. You tend not to waste time talking about things that don’t move you down the road. He mentioned something he called “Tea Time”  a technique for fueling your brainstorming process based on the fact that Laura Croft is British. It starts with a very specific problem (such as whether a game will be T or M) and an infuriating statement (like Mario doesn’t have enough blood)  with no rules during the session. He suggests you should be as crazy as you want, hoping that through the energy and chaos that you’ll come up with something interesting. Tim suggests you should always end with closing statements  force everyone to voice their biggest takeaway from the session  which can sometimes be tough. I’m still not sure why this was called “Tea Time”  but it is a framework that works at Crystal to solve very specific problems. Oh, and Tim says its fun.

On vision, Tim says that sometimes the vision changes along the way and you shouldn’t be a slave to your vision too early. Doing this puts you on the “blue line” (look at his slide deck to see what I mean  the blue line is bad) and you won’t explore enough along the way. He recognized that Republic Commando would have taken place on only one planet had their team stuck to the original vision.

Tim’s mentioned that he has been a lot less document heavy and more about things that actually demonstrate the game, and feels that this is a good trend for the industry. There are important docs to be written  but 400 page design docs aren’t helpful anymore. I agree completely  the best design doc is the game itself, which was never fully realized until it is done. Odd that the process of developing the game is a journey too  one in which the team should expect to find unexpected, interesting, and important things along the way. Meanderings.

Some of the deliverables for Tim’s idea generation process are “Post Cards”, better known as one-sheets. These are extremely focused high level pitches or goals, boiled down to a single sheet of paper and not a single character more. I hope Tim will publish examples of this  I’ve used similar things on my teams and they really help focus a team toward the true heart and soul of something.

Tim also uses blogs for more exploratory musings. Tim says this tool gives due diligence and informed defensible perspectives about a particular idea. Idea documentation, even ideas that weren’t used, are really important. How many times have you sat in a meeting and thought, dang it we’ve talked about this before but can’t remember what was resolved Whether is it blogs, or wikis, or whatever, this is a really good idea.

The discussion was extremely valuable, and Tim is a good speaker. I hope he gets the chance to put up some concrete examples of his tools and techniques  so what do you say, Tim? Can you do it?

John’s career in the military lead to the game industry. While stationed in California, John had a chance to give a tour of the base to Tom Clancy & Doug Littlejohns. They were building Red Storm Entertainment, and the meeting lead to his joining the company. After that, he worked for IBM on product development. John now serves as Studio Director at Destineer Studios, leading varied projects including game development, military simulation and training.

Leadership Lab

• Important questions for any leader:
  • Do I have what it takes to lead?
    • It takes confidence!
  • How do I become a better leader?
    • Get to know people.
    • Match people to roles.
  • What does it take to lead creative teams?
    • You need inspiration and vision.
  • What should my priorities be?
    • Understand priorities for company, for product, for colleagues. Combine them.

“If your actions inspire others to dream more, learn more, do more and become more, you are a leader.”
- John Quincy Adams

• Leadership principles
  • Explain what needs to be done
• Leadership style
  • Attitude is key. No matter what the problems are, you must overcome them. A positive attitude helps, but of course being realistic.
  • Learn to manage without authority — manage problems involving people that you don’t manage.

• Leadership resources
  • Read about other great leaders. How did they solve problems?
  • What actions inspire others?
  • Get to know your team. Get to know their personalities. They are your resources.

Case study: Catherine the Great

“Praise loudly, blame softly.”
- Catherine the Great

• Power
  • What are the keys to power in a company? Generally this is resource-based.
• Leadership styles
  • Rule by committee
  • Rule by one (Catherine was an autocrat.)
  • Grow team and allow for talent to shine.

• Conflict management
  • Withdraw! Don’t worry about it.
  • Force a decision. The end.
  • Compromise. Find a solution that solves the problem.
  • Conflict management. Bring people together, and get the conflicting parties to come together.

• Roles and responsibilities
  • CEO: manages company vision, goals. Power comes from decision making abilities and understanding of company.
  • CFO: manages financial status of company. Power comes from resource management.

Colin Powell’s recent presentation

• Leadership is leadership, is leadership.
• Same principles and techniques.
• Great leaders face reality and deal with it!
• Find ways to constantly reward and praise your team.
  • If you’re not doing this, then chances are you are only focusing on negatives.
• Prune the organization.

Technical Leadership

• What do technical leaders do?
  • They get inside their customer’s mind.
  • Give straightforward and honest opinions.
  • Champion decisions that benefit the company even at a cost to your own project.
  • Express enthusiasm about the opportunity to serve customers based on the underlying passion for creative technology and its impact on the world.

Command and Control

• How do you deal with the flood of data today?
  • Teams must understand the objective.
  • Freedom of action within clear boundaries.
  • Operate in a horizontal, team-oriented, collaborative environment.

Managing without authority

• How do you fix problems?
  • Skill
  • Knowledge
  • Resources
• 80% solution
  • Sometime this is the best thing that you have. Don’t wait for perfect knowledge to make decisions! You will miss things, because things are seldom perfect.
• Good, better, best
  • Figure out everything you need to do in a day. What is the BEST thing that you could do today?
• Conflict management
  • Work on a resolution together — empower your people to deal with problems.
  • Can anything be done to prevent it from happening in the future?

Overall things to consider

• Match talent with roles — it’s SIMPLE:
  • Set expectations
  • Invite committment
  • Measure progress
  • Provide feedback
  • Link to consequences
  • E

• Why do people stay in their organization?
  • “Finding meaning in the work I’m doing.”
  • “I like the people.”
  • “I can follow my dreams.”
• What great leaders do differently
  • Create tension to achieve
  • Pursue opportunities
  • Define the outcome
  • Focus on performance
  • Create heroes in every role
• Go toward the sound of the guns
  • Eyes on results
  • Team problem solving
  • Match talent with roles
  • Spend the most time with the best people
  • Don’t outsource retention

“If I have seen farther than others, it is because I stood on the shoulders of giants.”
- Sir Isaac Newton

The opening keynote was “Ultimate Objectives: Lessons Learned From Building BioWare” by Ray Muzyka Greg Zeschuk. Ray and Greg outlined the growth of BioWare from a tiny startup to a 800 milllion dollar EA acquisition.

Ray and Greg are well known for their deep, well thought-out approach to Bioware culture and processes. The presentation traced the history of how their mindset and approach to Bioware’s vision, mission and core values have slowly but steadily evolved over the 14 years of BioWare’s existence. It was a fascinating story that demonstrated that key leadership is just as important as talent.

I was planning to post a more detailed summary, but Gamasutra beat me to it: BioWare’s Doctors On The Power Of Leadership

Just a quick introduction: this is Jacques Pavlenyi, Segment Executive: Small and Medium Business – Communications Industries, IBM Corporation (how’s that for a mouthful of a title?).  I’ll be attending the IGDA Leadership Forum tomorrow and Friday.  I was honored to be asked by Jason Della Rocca to be one of the guest bloggers for the event.  I’ll specifically be covering the following sessions:

• Leveraging Outsourcing (Thu 4pm)
• Managing Artists & Art Outsourcing (Fri 10:45am)
• Local Asthetic/Localizations (Fri 1:15pm)

But of course I’ll be covering other sessions as well, particularly those with a more business, rather than technical, twist.  I’ll also be cross-posting to IBM’s blog on all things games, GameTomorrow (http://www.gametomorrow.com/blog).Â

Looking forward to meeting everyone in my fair city!

We’ve recruited a team of volunteers to serve as “live” bloggers for the Leadership Forum. They will write up summaries/notes from each session and post to this blog/site more-or-less after each session.

Our brave team of live bloggers is:

• Karen Clark – Director of Customer Experience, GarageGames
• Clinton Keith – CTO, High Moon Studios
• Mike McShaffry – freelance developer
• Alison Beasley – President, Lincoln Beasley PR
• Todd Northcutt – Director, GameSpy Technology
• Tim Longo – Creative Director/Senior Designer, Crystal Dynamics
• Jacques Pavlenyi – Segment Executive: Small and Medium Business – Communications Industries, IBM Corporation

Additionally, we encourage anyone doing their own blogging (or photo posting, etc) to use “IGDA-LF07″ as the content tag.

Thanks to all the attendees who submitted discussion topic ideas. The following list of topics have been selected:

• The Role of Leadership in an Agile Environment
• Strike Team Structures for Large Teams
• Art Tools: Workflow and Process
• IGDA Production SIG “Futures”
• Hiring Entry-Level Employees
• Problem Solving for Leadership
• IGDA Leadership Forum “Futures”
• Production Methodologies in Practice
• Bootstrapping Your Own Game Studio
• Getting People to Listen

Jump to the roundtables page for topic description and moderator info. Note that these roundtable sessions are optional, and will run during the second half of the lunch break (seating will be limited).