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

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.”

Thanks to all the great proposals and the hard work of the program committee, the following awesome line up of industry speakers have been confirmed for the IGDA Leadership Forum this fall:

• Mike Capps – President, Epic Games
• Heather Maxwell Chandler – Executive Producer, Media Sunshine
• Don Daglow – President and CEO, Stormfront Studios
• Jason Della Rocca – Executive Director, IGDA
• Shekhar Dhupelia – Development Director/Producer, Midway
• John Farnsworth – Studio Director, Destineer
• Jamie Fristrom – Technical Director, Torpex Games
• Tim Gerritsen – Executive Director, Big Rooster
• Michael Heilemann – Technical Director, Stormfront Studios
• Catherine Herdlick – Director of Game Production, gameLab
• Tim Longo – Creative Director/Senior Designer, Crystal Dynamics
• Mike McShaffry – freelance developer
• Ray Muzyka – CEO, BioWare Corp., Corporate VP and Director, BioWare/Pandemic
• Chris Natsuume – Creative Director, Boomzap
• Trent Oster – Project Director, BioWare Corp.
• Aaron Pulkka – Senior Director, Outsourcing, Vivendi Games
• Mike Swanson – Studio Art Production Manager, Gas Powered Games
• Tony Van – Executive Producer, Ubisoft
• Greg Zeschuk – President, BioWare Corp., Corporate VP and Director, BioWare/Pandemic

There are still a few folks we’re waiting on for confirmations, but this will serve as the bulk of our faculty for the Leadership Forum.

More details to come in the near future regarding their actual topics and session descriptions, along with a preliminary schedule.