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Project Leadership

Posted by JasonDellaRocca on July 24th, 2008

The sessions in the Project Leadership Track will focus on the nuts and bolts of game production.

Sessions

Session Descriptions

Project Management Idea Swap

Joshua Caulfield
Executive Director – IGDA
This fully interactive group driven session is like speed-dating for ideas on project management. Tables will focus on different project management and production related topics (determined by conference participants ahead of time). Several group/topic rotations will be done so participants can explore various topics of interest, and interact with many different peers along the way. Room-wide report outs and summaries will close out the session. More participation details to be provided in October…

Learning Objectives

  • Ask and answer project management questions most relevant to you
  • Meet and learn directly from peers in a semi-structured format
  • Identify new ideas and info for further investigation

“The Hourglass”:  A Leadership Lesson Learned through Teaching

Michael John
Senior Creative Director – EA

In the winter of 1839, Charles Goodyear accidentally dropped a mixture of rubber and sulfur on a hot stove, and discovered vulcanized rubber.  Sometimes accidents turn out to be the best way to learn things.

Soon after joining Electronic Arts in early 2008, I was given the task of creating and leading a design education course.  After talking with many friends in the industry and academia, I settled on an exercise I called the “Board Game Challenge” as the centerpiece of a series of workshops.

Though these challenges were a lot of fun, they were a failure as practical design education.  However I had begun to notice a pattern:  the teams that did well in the challenge seemed to function in one particular way:  Teams that engaged in a pattern of broad and open input, then rapid decisive action, synchronized to the exercise’s tight time schedule, consistently performed better.

I’ve documented this pattern, along with examples from the Board Game Challenge, into what I call “The Hourglass,” and this is now the lesson I not only talk about in classes, but that I apply regularly when working as a Creative Director.

Learning Objectives

  1. A well-designed mix of open input and decisive, goal-oriented leadership leads to solid creative results.
  2. Some descriptions of how that design-oriented leader thinks and acts.
  3. If have the opportunity to teach or mentor, do it.  You’ll learn things you don’t anticipate.

Wrangling the Tornado: Production in the Land of Sid

Barry Caudill
Executive Producer – Firaxis Games

I used to think of it as herding cats but that doesn’t really do it justice.  At Firaxis we are very driven by Sid’s methods and his approach to making games.  Iteration and rapid development are king and things remain fluid for much longer than they would elsewhere.  Because of this, we don’t like to be bound by methodologies or processes.  Instead we are guided by the fun.  Much of what we do is either hybridized or even drastically different depending on the project or team.  This ends up making things much tougher on our producers but the end result is very satisfying.

Learning Objectives

  1. It’s about the team and the project – not the process or the methodology.
  2. Your results may vary but we feel that fun should be the deciding factor when making games.
  3. Sid’s rules of game design, why they are important and what impact do they have on production.

Lean Product Development – Eliminating Waste

Michael Saladino
Executive Producer – Pandemic Studios

In the games industry, costs have skyrocketed with the most recent console transition.  Games that used to be able to turn a profit with less than a million units are now losing money unless they hit multi-million sales.  This is an issue of runaway costs much of which can be traced back to wasting time and money with inefficient systems.  Game developers are wasting time with poor tools, fragile code bases, changing priorities, and allowing mountains of partially done work to slow a team’s ability to find the fun.  This session will focus on identifying what truly is important to your customer… to find the value.  And with value defined, we will then focus on waste and how to eliminate it.  We will look at the Seven Waste of Manufacturing and how they map to evolving software.  With these tools, you can begin reducing the cost of making your game and optimize delivering real value to your customers whether through a packaged good or through games as a service.

Learning Objectives

  1. To understand the difference between value and waste
  2. To understand the seven wastes of software development
  3. To understand how to eliminate waste in the systems around you

Leading High-Quality Engineering Teams

John Northan
Director of Technology – Pandemic Studios

Engineering teams in the games industry differ in their leadership strategies.  Unfortunately, the strategy is often given little thought.  Rather than beginning with an understanding of the leadership and management skill sets required, the leadership team is often built on an ad-hoc basis.  Sometimes the lead structure from a previous game is used by default, other times a new hire who has “Lead” before is brought in, and sometimes the engineer with the strongest personality or best brain is elevated to the top.

This talk discuss how critical it is to understand the three key areas that need to be handled by the engineering leadership.  Often this will require three distinct engineers, each with specific skills and leadership qualities.  A Technical Director needs to handle core systems development (includes streaming, memory, tools, pipeline,…). A Lead Gameplay Engineer needs to focus on the creative, gameplay side of the game (includes player controls/camera, AI, animation, UI, …).  Finally a Technical Producer is necessary to handle recruitment, project management, engineer morale and development.
Without coverage of all three skill sets, teams will unknowingly set themselves up for difficulties.  The types of problem associated with each missing skill set are highlighted.  Several, major title, case studies are discussed to provide examples of the engineering leadership model in action (and not in action!).

Learning Objectives

  1. Learn the three key skill sets required for a successful engineering leadership team.
  2. Understand the risks and likely problems a project will encounter by not covering each of these skills.
  3. Learn how to identify engineers suitable for leadership in each of the three roles.

Small Games Case Studies

Advergame Case Study description

Jeremy Mayes
Director of Game Production – Arkadium

In the current economic climate, the growth of free branded entertainment, or advergames, have reigned king in the marketplace. Casual game play is on the rise and with that has come the opportunity for small studios and indie game developers to partner with large brands to help spawn ideas and create new and innovative games. These partnerships can result in market success stories, but getting there can be challenging for both the small firms and big brands they are working with. How do independent game studios have to adjust their processes and internal culture to ensure that every phase from conceptualization, development and launch runs smoothly? This session will review case studies on several large advergame projects with leading consumer brands.

Learning Objectives

  1. Review case studies on several large advergame projects with leading consumer brands.
  2. Learn how to identify and address common pitfalls before and during the game development process.
  3. Understand what key processes need to be in place in order to scale development effectively.

Developing for iPhone from start to App Store and beyond

Brian Robbins
Founder/President – Riptide Games

This session will provide attendees with a firm understanding of what it takes to develop an iPhone game from the initial conception through it’s release on the App Store and beyond. It will begin with a look at the major steps in the development process, then move into more in-depth discussion of each step. Special attention will be devoted for potential problem areas or issues that teams are likely to face along the way.The target audience for this is studio heads and producers that are looking to get into the iPhone market or those that need to manage iPhone development.

Learning Objectives

  1. Understand the big-picture process for developing and releasing an iPhone game
  2. Know some of the biggest problem areas they may face during the development process
  3. Be able to make a more informed decision about getting into the iPhone development space, or if they are already doing iPhone development, how their processes could be improved.

Quick and dirty: Producing small PC games

Paraluman Cruz
Producer/Designer – Boomzap Entertainment

Boomzap Entertainment has shipped eight PC casual game titles in the past five years, working with four- or five-person teams across South East Asia. Its driving philosophy is quick and dirty prototyping. Most of our games are built on top of a black-and-white, purely functional prototype, with art only reaching full quality near alpha. We build our games daily, using a Results-Only Work Environment to find the fun as quickly as possible.
This talk will cover Boomzap’s best practices in developing small PC games, and how these practices influence production and results. Some of the topics include daily builds and playtests, using flat teams (instead of leads), managing feature creep, and more.  Attendees will take away real examples of producing small indie games for the PC, and receive practical advice on how to adopt these ideas for their own projects and teams.

Learning Objectives

  1. Learn how to develop small PC games in a quick and dirty, prototype-driven format
  2. Learn how rapid prototyping affects project pipelines and schedules, and how to manage teams (and publishers) with this setup
  3. Get practical advice on using a Results-Only Work Environment to your project’s advantage

Tools Review Jam

Toby Allen
Producer, Sumo Digital
Ten tools in 60 minutes: a crash course in tools options for busy game developers! Volunteer attendees will share their personal review of a tool that aids the production process. Each structured review will provide a brief summary of the key features and examples of how these were applied on a game development team.
Learning Objectives

  • 1. Get rapid-fi re insight into key game development tools.
  • 2. See what tools are most interesting or applicable to
  • your process.
  • 3. Inspiration to fi nd out more…

Taking the Reins of a Team at Full Speed

Jeff Charvat
Sr. Development Director – EA

The idealistic world of starting a project with a great idea, a small talented team and building an execution plan that includes smart development practices, smarter recruiting and ramping into full production is occasionally realized.  But just as often, game development leaders are assigned to a team already established and moving at full speed.  The art of stepping into these teams in a leadership position is one that Jeff Charvat has more experience in than he would prefer.  This session will articulate the best practices and the pitfalls he has stumbled through during his 20+ years of game making.  We will cover how to ramp up quickly and make effective course corrections without alienating existing leadership.  Additionally, we will define methods for learning the team’s people and culture followed by effective tactics at learning the project’s creative vision and execution plan.  In conclusion, we will cover the best way to introduce new processes and how to dismantle other ineffective processes all with an eye towards making the best game possible within the constraints of the situation.

Learning objectives

  1. Becoming an influential member of a large team with established leaders and culture
  2. How to effectively implement new development processes on a team in full motion
  3. When to challenge existing protocols and when to let them fester

QA Leadership: Leading teams though organizational transformation

David Steele
Sr. Director, Worldwide QA – EA

These days it is vital that organizations balance cost and quality. How do companies stretch their QA dollar to provide the highest value at the lowest cost with the least amount of risk involved. Economic difficulties are impacting most companies these days and providing high quality test resources is a key component to any teams Responsibility Margin. Where to focus the efforts, how to motivate teams during transition and how to continue innovating Quality Assurance methodologies are key in any company. Motivating people to grow, learn and continue challenging the status quo is difficult in the best of times and even more difficult in today’s economy. How do you “rebuild the engine while driving the car?” How do you transform an organization while continuing to provide the highest quality test and QA services?

Learning objectives

  1. Motivating and Leading QA through strategic change
  2. Leading the QA transition to an outsource test model
  3. Transforming QA teams to an embedded model

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