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February 25, 2005
Chairman Update: February 05
All,
As is traditional with my monthly updates, let me start be welcoming our newest members of the production SIG to the group. As of today, there are over 170 producers and project managers contributing to the SIG - a major increase since our last update.
In terms of the SIG activities, things are kicking into high gear with the start of the New Year and the busy holiday season behind us. Dan Irish has been in contact with many of you, putting names to sections of our upcoming initiative, "Formalizing a Production Process." The last Excel sheet I received from Dan was nearly filled out so thanks to all of you who have offered your time and effort in getting this initiative cranking. The next step will be setting up a schedule for the initiative so that we can begin to put some deadlines on the section work and give the contributors some goals to work toward while balancing the initiative contributions around your busy production schedules. Dan is one the east coast at the moment but will be sending an update himself in the coming days to fill everyone in with more detail on this important initiative.
In other news, I'll be hosting a roundtable at Game Developers Conference this year titled "Pro Active: Tackling Production Challenges." This roundtable as part of the IGDA track of GDC will be instrumental in highlighting pressing production issues facing our industry today. While this session will inevitably raise some important topics for us all to consider, it is also intended to be a forum to target topics worthwhile for this community to consider when planning our next initiative for 2005-2006. I encourage you all to attend if you'll be traveling out to GDC this year; the session is offered at two times during the week - Wednesday from 2:30-3:30 and on Friday from 12:00-1:00.
While at GDC, I also encourage you to attend the IGDA Quality of Life Summit offered on both Monday and Tuesday. We can all agree that production faces difficult challenges as we move into the next generation of hardware, and it can be easily argued that quality of life concerns are increasingly important problems to address as we look to the future. Production is in a unique position to manage these quality of life issues and these GDC sessions should be considered some of the most important features of the conference for producers attending the conference.
As many of you noticed, the IGDA itself went through a major evolution at the beginning of the year by ending its agreement with CMP. While I believe that Jason Della Rocca's update covered all the important and exciting details with regard to this transition, I wanted to point out again that the membership fee structure for the IGDA has changed as well. Individual memberships which were previously $100 have dropped substantially to only $48 per year. If you're not already a member of the IGDA I encourage you to support the organization by signing up as a paid member to take advantage of the membership benefits the IGDA offers. www.igda.org/join
That should cover us for now; I hope to have some more details on the initiative activity in my next update.
Thanks for your support - be sure to tell your friends to sign up on the mail list if you find the mail list discussions and future projects to be of interest.
As always, if you have any questions or comments on the SIG feel free to drop me a line.
Stuart Roch
Chairperson, IGDA Production SIG
Posted by della at February 25, 2005 03:19 PM