(4) Game Production Parts

WHAT IS A GAME MADE OF? >

Game Production Parts

a) Design Parts

b) Coding Parts

c) Art Parts

d) Audio Parts

e) Management Parts

GAME PRODUCTION PARTS

Surely a game project is all about producing a great game. Game development is the most critical component of a successful electronic entertainment product. However, the developers hold a sacred trust given to them by the rest of the project stakeholders that they will be able to develop a compelling and competitive game, on budget and on time. Developers must perform to the best of their ability to deliver the strongest game on time and on budget.

DESIGN PARTS

1. Lead Designers/Visionary
2. Game Mechanics
3. Level/Mission Designers
4. Story and Dialogue Writers

WHERE DO LEAD DESIGNERS COME FROM?

We have to design a game first and foremost. Some games have a key visionary who has been kicking around an idea for a long time; others are more of a collaborative process with a leader. There is probably no single more difficult task in the industry than being able to create an original game of your own design and see it through to commercial release (only a nitpicker would point out that seeing your game become a mega-hit would be harder). Each game has its own story of how it got to be funded and made. However, it is usually the publisher or the studio head of a successful game development company that has finally arranged for all the business points to be in place in order to kick off their game.

If the publisher suggests the game concept, then the developer will supply the lead designer. Often the founder of a game development company will act as a lead designer on the project.

The lead designer’s job is to coordinate the design staff in the effort to create timely, thorough, compelling game design specifications that the rest of the team can readily use and is readily understood by the game’s publisher and other key stakeholders. The lead designer is not responsible for designing the whole game; rather it is the lead designer’s role to be a director and sculpt not only what goes into a game, but also what does not belong and should be cut. (In practice, the lead designer also picks up any design tasks that the rest of the team is not able to do.)

HOW DO YOU NAIL DOWN THE GAME MECHANICS?

Each game usually has a lead game mechanics designer. This person often has a game programming background, as programmers are the ones most likely to implement the game mechanics in the code. This person receives direction from the lead designer, solicits engineering feasibility from the programming staff, and confers with the mission or level designers to find out their requirements. Depending on the type of game, the game mechanics designer often plays with Excel, trying to achieve a rough balance to the game and simulating portions of the game to get an idea of how some of their mechanics will play both for single player and multiplayer.

WHO ARE THE LEVEL AND MISSION DESIGNERS?

Some games have levels, others have missions, and quite a few have neither. Whatever game you have, it can almost always be broken down into a series of smaller challenges, puzzles, levels, or missions for the player to complete. Level and mission designers are sometimes programmers writing scripting code for a mission. Sometimes these designers are artists laying out tiles of a map and designing triggers, and sometimes they work in pure text, describing to others how the game should be laid out.

STORY AND DIALOGUE WRITERS ARE WRITERS FOR INTERACTIVITY

Writing a compelling narrative that is formatted for the high degree of interactivity found in games is a wholly different skill than writing the narrative of a short story or novel or a motion picture screenplay. A writer for games needs to spend a lot of time with the lead designer for direction on where to take the story arc, and he or she needs to spend even more time with the mission and story writers to determine what is possible and not possible to do in the scripting language, map editor, or level building tool.

Writing natural sounding language for characters is not the same as just listening to people talk and writing it down; it is a talent for having an ear that sets the right rhythm of tone and balance for their characters to speak in a fantasy world in a believable manner.

I am discussing design roles that people will play, not saying that each project will literally divide its design tasks into discrete people; in other words, designers will cross over back and forth through these roles.

CODING PARTS

I detailed game designers first, as the designers define the spirit of the game; however, I have often been caught saying the ultimate designers on a project are the programmers and the artists. The designers can write documents and create specifications until they turn blue, but the game will not be anything other than what the programmers and artists create. I am not trying to cast programmers as an uncooperative bunch; I am a programmer myself. What I am trying to say is that the programmers and artists are very special people and often need to be convinced of the designer’s vision. Most often the final implementation is a blend of the designers’, programmers’, and artists’ collective vision.

The programmers’ roles are to obviously create the code: the 3D engine, the networking library, art asset converter, and such, to realize the vision for the game. Games are often late, over budget, or buggy as I mentioned earlier. Games are hardly ever late two months while they wait for the tile artist to get her act together, and games are hardly ever late by a month because the audio guys have not mastered your sounds yet. It is a rare project that is delayed due to sheer asset production deficiencies, and even when that occurs the programmers are not idle. Why? Because electronic games boil down to just code—code with art, code with sound, code with gameplay, yes, but it is still just code. Even with code being the main deliverable, why does it always have to be late? This is an issue that is larger than the game industry. In Steve McConnell’s Rapid Development, he writes that 50 to 90 percent of general software engineering projects are significantly late. Software engineering projects, in general, are chronically failing. The reason for this is that we game developers are part of a larger industry— software development—that is in turn an immature branch of the engineering discipline. The processes in specifying software, the processes for creating software, and the processes for testing software and even establishing skill levels in programmers have yet to be established! You have to be a licensed engineer to pilot a ship for commercial transport, to build a bridge or a skyscraper, or even analyze the soil on a hill for a single-family dwelling. In fact, in California and in most states you must have a license to cut someone’s hair. No one needs a license to write code.

The idea of licensing game programmers may seem, at first, ridiculously out of place in the game industry. The lifeblood, the very soul of the industry is founded on clever people dropping out of whatever they were doing before and putting their heart and soul into creating a fun game. Why do I advocate the clearly un-fun part of getting a license to write code?

Imagine a future of game development where each game project has a licensed software engineer as the lead programmer or technical director (with the license administered much like a professional engineering license). With this type of person a very important safety structure has been put into place. Someone is responsible for the technical soundness of a project, and not only is her name and reputation on the line for this project, but her license to operate as a professional engineer could be revoked if she is shown to be manifestly negligent in her role as a technical director. I know I am way out on my own here with this opinion, but I really think this would protect not just the programming staff from unreasonable schedules, but the publishers themselves. They could lay down some outline of a feature set, quality level, budget, and timeline and say go make the game, but it would be so much stronger if they had to have the signature of the lead programmer (a licensed software engineer) to sign off on the project before the project could continue past preproduction and into production.

Microsoft employs a version of this method where Microsoft employees have to sign off on a developer for technical, artistic, design, and project management competence before any funding of the team can commence.

Well, enough of my diatribe on the merits of licensing programmers, let’s go see what they actually do on a project.

LEAD PROGRAMMERS AND TECHNICAL DIRECTORS

The lead programmer has traditionally been the most experienced programmer on the team (from the 1970s through the 1980s, he or she could have been the only programmer). The lead programmer usually takes on the programming tasks that are the most challenging of the project. The quintessential examples of lead programmers are John Carmack of id and Tim Sweeney of Epic. These guys are usually the heroes of the projects, and many teams are structured around the lead programmer.

Some games tend to have a large programming staff, such as the massively multiplayer game Ultima Online or EverQuest, or the single-player/ multiplayer game Neverwinter Nights with over 25 programmers. These large projects typically employ a technical director that oversees the programmers and reports directly to the project manager. The technical director title implies much less coding being performed by the individual and more management of programmers and code creation. Sometimes smaller projects employ a technical director when the lead programmer is handling a tricky part of the project she does not care for or has no time for, or is otherwise not suitable for project management.
Another model is to have a series of “assistant leads” who are all responsible for different aspects of a programming task—i.e., functional leads—who each in turn manage a few programmers and who ultimately report to the lead programmer. This is the model at
BioWare and at Taldren.
The lead programmer is like the queen in chess; she might be your most productive programmer on the project, but you must use her time wisely. Technical directors, on the other hand, act as scouts on behalf of the programming staff, looking ahead, lining up dependencies between programmers, and coordinating the development of the software.
The rest of the programming positions

I describe below are not necessarily distinct humans on every project; rather they are common programming roles that most projects have. A lot of projects, for example, have the 3D graphics programmer and the lead programmer be one and the same, or the game mechanics and user interface programmer could be the same person.

GAME MECHANICS PROGRAMMER

The game mechanics programmer is the one who converts the “real meat and potatoes” of the game design into playable code. This person usually models the physics of the game world, how objects such as weapons and potions work, and how the protagonists
and antagonists function.

The game mechanics programmer can usually be seen near one of the project’s designers, debating the merits of the designer’s weapon mechanics and such. The game mechanics position is usually a mid-level programming jobs that ambitious scripters and mission programmers often grow into.

The great thing about being the game mechanics programmer is you are the one who really puts the game into the game. You are the first one to see a lightning bolt strike the ogre, the first to see a tank shell a building, and the first to see the health pack heal the character. This is a fun job.

3D GRAPHICS PROGRAMMER

The 3D graphics programmer is one of the most highly respected positions in the industry. 3D graphics programmers must have a strong comfort level in mathematics including calculus, vector and matrix math, trigonometry, and algebra. The 3D graphics programmers enjoy seeing their work come vividly into being in lush 3D graphics, immersing the player in environments they can only dream about.

ARTIFICIAL INTELLIGENCE PROGRAMMER

The demands on the artificial intelligence programmer vary from game to game and from genre to genre. Steven Polge, now working with Epic, has written some truly impressive bits of AI code such as the Reaper bot. Also, the AI programmers are usually the folks who have the proper skills to write scripting languages and other tools used by the designers.

USER INTERFACE PROGRAMMER

The user interface programmer is the person who has the tricky job of developing the software that bridges the game mechanics of the fantasy world with a slick implementation of the user interface through the controls, in-game panels, and HUD elements, as well as the shell or navigational menus. The UI programmer is the expert on the UI library and usually maintains it by extending its functionality. The UI programmer position is one that is likely to have been gained through experience in the industry. UI programming is often hard to get precisely right and is often under appreciated.

AUDIO PROGRAMMER

The audio programmer is the person who codes up the 3D sound effects, the voice-over tag system, and the music playback system. Often this position is a light position due to strong, widely used audio libraries available such as the Miles Sound System from RAD Tools.

TOOLS PROGRAMMER

Michael Abrash once told me that id spends greater than 50 percent of its programming resources creating tools. This is a significant statement. Most game companies do not commit this level of programming resources to their games. BioWare has a large tools department as well, over ten people, who make tools for all of BioWare’s games. They have found this saves a lot of time and rework by designers and artists. The fact that id is arguably the most successful developer ever, with many mega-hits of their own as well as a prosperous licensing program that includes other mega-hits such as Half-Life, seems to say that every programmer on the project should be a tools programmer half of the time.

Most teams do not have full-time tools programmers, although if the team is part of a larger house, there might be a tools department. Still, every solid game company builds up its own toolset over time to get graphics on the screen, get audio out the speakers, and get the characters in the game to have interesting behavior.

A game development organization should have short-term and long-term tools production goals. I suggest a Gantt chart produced in MS Project be printed out and hung on a wall to indicate the internal tools development in your organization. This visibility will help everyone see how the tools are integral to the growth of your team and how things are planned to get better in the future.

MISSION/LEVEL EDITOR PROGRAMMER

The mission editor programmer is just one of the tools positions; however, for many games with a mission or level editor, the editor will be released to the public with the game’s release.
Developing a mission editor or level editor that is robust and easy to use is the work of creating another piece of commercial software. The UnrealEd level editor for the creation of Unreal Tournament levels by Epic is a fine example of a 3D solid constructive geometry modeling and scripting tool that is extremely powerful, robust, and easy to use by both industry professionals and by fans who want to make new content for their favorite games.
Some development houses organize a world-building tool as part of the main game team, and others put this work in the tools group if they were rigorous in the technical design of the world editor to make it truly useful for other game projects.

NETWORK, SERVER, OR CLIENT PROGRAMMER

The network programmer writes the low-level and application-level code to get games running between a small number of players using modems, a local area network, or across the Internet. In the past the network programmer had to master a variety of protocols such as IPX, and serial and modem protocols. Modern games are now run almost exclusively on TCP/IP and UDP, the networking protocols of the Internet.

The multiplayer architecture of games can be broken down into two main structures: peer-to-peer and client-server.

Peer-to-peer structures have all of the player machines simulating their own copy of the game and use a variety of algorithms to keep the states on the different computers as close as possible. The peer-to-peer machines all talk directly to every other computer in the network. The bandwidth required to service this model of game grows exponentially with each added player. That is an unfortunate side effect as you try to handle more players.

The client-server structure divides up the computing of game simulation into a server, which handles the actual simulation, and the client, which is the viewer, or browser, of the world events. There are several benefits to this structure, including the fact that the bandwidth requirement grows only linearly with the number of players, and the game can also be protected from quite a few forms of cheating by having it run on a trusted and secure server.
(Remember, in a peer-to-peer game each machine is running its own copy of the world and has authority on some portion of the world. This authority can easily be abused by running a rogue version in the peer-to-peer network.)

Why are not all games clientserver?

Arguably they all should be; however, depending on the game, the client-server architecture is much more complex and requires divorcing the simulation and the presentation along much stricter object-oriented lines. Today’s massively multiplayer games are a prime example of the complexity of client-server games. Literally dozens
of machines, running a score or more instances of servers, carry out different operations such as player authentication, version checking, cheat detection, game simulation, chat hosting, database transactions, and more. Peer-to-peer games are much more similar to traditional single-player games with the exception of the games periodically making corrections to be more in line with each other’s view of the world.

ART PARTS

The artists of an electronic game may wear a host of different titles just like the programmers. Games used to have a single artist drawing the character sprites and the world backdrops for these electronic heroes to carry out their missions. In the earliest days the programmer, designer, and artist were one and the same person. Starting in the mid-’80s small teams of artists, usually no more than three, would work on a project. Starting in the early ’90s game projects grew substantially in their art requirements and budgets.

Famous examples of these are Wing Commander IV by Origin, where over $10 million was spent by Chris Roberts on chasing the dream of the fabled movie-in-a-game; Mario64, rumored to have a budget of over $20 million; and finally the Japanese epics in the Final Fantasy series and Shenmue, which have had gargantuan budgets.

Artists are now differentiated by their skill sets. It is interesting to know that many artists can build 3D models of the most arcane objects quite accurately and swiftly without being able to sketch them. The domain of the artist now covers a wide enough area that you will need to plan your art team carefully to be sure you have enough bandwidth of skill and talent across your art requirements.

ART DIRECTOR

The art director is the manager for the art team, scouting ahead to be sure that project dependencies are taken care of ahead of time and that the artists produce their art assets on time for the rest of the game project. The other, arguably more important role is to look at every art asset as it is being constructed to be sure it is consistent in quality and theme with the rest of the game.

The art director job should be given to the artist with the most industry experience, tempered with people skills, and the person who best enjoys the entire team’s respect.


CONCEPT ARTIST

The concept artist is gathering visibility. In the past a few sketches would convey the look of the major characters and locations, and the game was off into production. Now with project budgets 10 and 20 times larger than in 1995, the stakes are much larger and the penalty for getting the art wrong is often fatal to a project. This is where the concept artist saves the day. High-quality black-and-white drawings are often colorized (color comp) to accurately convey to the art director, the producer, and the major project stakeholders what the look of an art asset will be before it is created. For example, on our Starfleet Command series, we needed to create a black-and-white sketch for each and every proposed ship model we wanted to introduce into our Star Trek game. These black-and-white sketches first made the rounds of the team to be sure we liked them, then the sketch went on to Interplay’s upper management, then on to Paramount’s interactive licensing director, and on to even Rick Berman, the producer of the Star Trek television show and movies now at Paramount. Only when we received approval from all these folks did we start to colorize the sketch and start the approval process once again for the colorized sketch. Once this was approved, we were permitted to actually begin work on an art asset that would make it into the game. (The resulting 3D model would of course need to make this same approval-seeking trip.)

This approval process is even more stringent at LucasArts on Star Wars properties, and Japanese games are very much oriented around the concept artist, such as Yoshitaka, best known in the game industry for his work on the Final Fantasy series.

2D ARTIST/INTERFACE DESIGNER

The 2D artist is an expert in classical sketching and painting. These artists are capable of painting backdrops, creating character portraits, and creating tiles and sprites for use in non-3D game engines. These artists used to use Deluxe Paint in the golden age of game development and have now moved on to Photoshop, Illustrator, and other packages. Even in a 3D game, the 2D artist is an incredibly versatile and important member of the team, producing highres artwork for ads and marketing, and helping to create assets for a promotional web site, install graphics, and countless more elements of 2D art.
The interface designer usually is an expert 2D artist with a strong sense of functional aesthetics. This artist will make just navigating your game’s menus an exciting and fun activity. The interface designer is a key team member; be sure you have one, or don’t make your game. Sometimes designers and programmers with strong visual design skills can successfully fill this role. This area of art is the most closely tied to your game—the game design, the game mechanics, and the look of the game. And these areas see the most change of any art asset. For these reasons, I strongly recommend against outsourcing your interface design art assets—get the best person you can and work with him full time.

3D MODELER

The 3D modeler was the highlight of the show around 1994-1997. At this time artists with experience in the industry were almost invariably 2D artists who were clever or stubborn enough to get their 2D visions articulated into a painfully small set of pixels using tools such as Deluxe Paint on the Amiga and later the PC. These artists on the whole were not prepared to handle the technical requirements of operating a 3D modeling package. Instead, a strange hybrid programmer- artist with a fascination for things 3D was required to operate the early arcane 3D packages. These artists were also in prime demand in the movie industry, and the scale of wages paid there made it very difficult for the game companies to recruit them over to games. In these years game projects had to train their 2D Deluxe Paint artists slowly to use early versions of LightWave and other technical 3D packages.

Over time the packages got much stronger and easier to use. College courses now teach 3D Studio Max, and in general people have had time to learn how to use the 3D modeling packages. 3D modelers are still highly respected members of any game team, but it is more balanced now with the other key art positions.

CHARACTER MODELER

The character modeler is a specialized breed of 3D modeler. Some strong 3D artists are competent at making mechanical things such as spaceships, tanks, and architecture, while others seem to lean towards the organics of characters. Low-poly character modelers have a special understanding of how the detail of the character will come to life in the texture stage to make the most economical use of their polygon budget.

TEXTURE ARTIST

The texture artist, like the concept artist, is now a highly visible element of your art team. Games are almost always constructed out of polygons with textures on them. The sophistication of the modeling packages is so strong now, the texture phase of creating a 3D object is usually estimated at three to four times longer than the actual building of the model. The texture artist is a 2D artist who can “skin” an object in his mind and create a compelling set of textures to “paint” that skin on the 3D model.

ANIMATOR/MOTION CAPTURE STUDIO

Animation comes in two broadly different categories: character/animal/monster animation and everything else. Rotating antennas, windmills, and radar dishes are good examples of the everything else category. Animating a windmill is an almost trivial task for an artist on your team, while animating the snarl on a goblin’s face is an entirely different task.
* Key framing is the technique of using a 3D modeling package to set key frames to have the engine interpolate between.
* Motion capture is using a special matrix camera to record the movements of a real human actor wearing a motion capture suit that has funny reflective balls attached to it. Most projects that use motion capture also use key framing for part of their animation duties.

To animate a character, two different solutions are at your disposal: key framing and motion capture. Key framing is the older, more established method of animating your characters.
Key framing excels at animating cartoon characters and monsters and for extreme movements—motions that are impossible to capture with a human actor. Animating by key framing is an entirely different skill set from 3D modeling, texturing, or sketching. If your project will involve characters that need to be animated, be sure your team has enough competent animators to get the job done; animation can be a slow art.

Motion capture is the buzzword— this is the state of the art. Humans move with very subtle grace; studying a motion-captured movement will reveal how much the whole body moves during the walk or the swing of a bat. Motion capture’s largest drawback would have to be cost in both dollars and time spent massaging the data into usable form. This field is constantly improving, and there are half a dozen competitors in the field.

There is quite a bit of technical drudgery involved in smoothing out all of the details of the character’s model and animations—dealing with the skeleton, motion capture data, prop bones, and a host of tiny, necessary details.
Some studios divide this work between the modelers and the animators depending on the nature of the task, and other studios like BioWare have dedicated folks called character riggers who handle these types of tasks.

STORYBOARDER

If your game is to have any movies or cinematic sequences, it is important that your team have a storyboard artist. The storyboard artist will be able to design and articulate the scenes in a sequence for internal and external review before committing to costly live action or resource-intensive computer generated sequences. Show the movies to the publisher, show them to the team, and work it all out ahead of time through simple boxes and captions.
Most story boarders are accomplished concept artists but not necessarily.

AUDIO PARTS

Audio assets come in three main flavors: sound effects, music, and voiceover. In the beginning there were only crude sound effects performing buzzes, beeps, and whistles. We now have full Dolby 5.1 3D sound. Music has come a long way from clever timing of beeps to compositions by film composers performed by 50-piece live orchestras. And voice acting is now an art form performed by stars like Patrick Stewart and contracted under the authority of the Screen Actors Guild.

VOICE-OVERS

Voices in a game really bring it to life. Compelling voice acting reinforces every other element of interactivity by having the actors speak to your character. The tutorials for Starfleet Command went from being a dry introduction to our gameplay to being the most compelling Star Trek moment I ever experienced with George Takei performing Admiral Sulu teaching me to command a starship. I remember when Origin’s Strike Commander was released for $50, but an additional speech pack was available for $20 more. That is a testament to wacky product strategies as well as a testament to the compelling depth voice adds to a game.

The only way to get good voice work done is to work with an experienced voice-over director. A good director will know immediately where to secure the talent, the studio time, and the engineer, and get you the post processed audio in a format you need. The pleasant surprise of voice work is that it is probably the coolest element you can add to your game for the money, and it is essential in many role-playing games, which are dialog and VO intensive.

SOUND EFFECTS

Sound effect engineers are wizards at listening to one sound and finding clever ways to stretch it, compress it, twist it, and come up with precisely the sound you need. Sometimes they will Foley—that is, record your sound effect from the actual object generating the sound. Sometimes the sound engineer will record some other sound and then twist it around just for your game. Sound effects are an excellent target for outsourcing as only the larger developers with three or more concurrent projects can keep a sound effects crew productively working.



MUSIC

Some games spend a lot of effort on music, and it really gets the emotional hooks into the player when the music is first-rate. Music is probably the most popular and oldest art form worldwide. Nearly any emotion can be invoked with compelling music. There are two options: synthesized music and music that is performed live. We spent nearly $100,000 on the score and 30-piece orchestra performance for Starfleet Command 2. The music was very special; all of the sounds are richer and fuller bodied when performed by humans versus a synthesized chip.
That being said, a single musician can create extremely strong music with a professional synthesizer and software.


MANAGEMENT PARTS

Management of a game project is the most critical component in my experience. In recent private email with other studio heads in the industry, the consensus was that a developer is limited in number of teams not by programmers or artists, but by quality producers/ project managers. That being said, the management of a game project is often shared by a group of individuals with different responsibility sets.

LINE PRODUCER

The line producer coordinates countless small tasks that one by one are not very challenging, but taken as a whole is a daunting amount of work that needs to get done every day. If a project lacks a line producer, the efficacy of every team member will be compromised by a little distraction at a time. The line producer will often supply the team with food when the hours are forced and late; will get design documents printed and sent overnight; and will often coordinate getting builds out to the publisher and to beta testers.
The line is a critical function that should be filled by a line producer, instead of your art director on Mondays, your 3D graphics programmer on Tuesdays, and so on.



ASSOCIATE PRODUCER

The associate producer is found on larger projects in a single team company, and all companies with multiple teams need an associate producer. Publishers also structure themselves with an executive producer managing a group of titles and an associate producer on each title performing day-today management. The associate producers have an interesting combination of a lot of responsibility and little authority. The associate producer is the understudy of the executive producer. The business negotiations, contracting, and human resource decisions will be carried out by the executive producer, but in almost every other aspect of the game project the associate producer will have a strong contribution to make. The associate producers are often burdened with the dreary task of updating the schedule and reporting on task tracking. The associate also helps communication between all team members and is usually the strongest advocate for the game. In truth, each studio has its own name for the hierarchy of managers in the organization such as assistant producers, senior group producers, and project planners.

STUDIO HEAD/EXECUTIVE PRODUCER

The studio head at a game developer and the executive producer at the publisher each have the same fundamental job on a game project: be responsible for planning and executing the project in a profit-producing manner. Studio heads are almost always the founders of their own companies, those who have risen through the ranks and are industry veterans and who have paid their dues and made money for their publishers in the past. In the case of Valve, Gabe Newell brought lots of project management experience from 13 years of creating software such as Microsoft Windows. Studio heads run small companies—game development shops—and have to simultaneously be game designers who are passionate about their games, software managers who respect technology, and businessmen who are savvy enough to get a good publishing deal. Some developers such as id and Epic have divided the role of the studio head into a more practical split of one person running the business and another acting as the project leader for the game. The business development executive at the publisher often supplies the executive producer on the publishing side with a game project and game developer lead. The executive producer’s job is to then complete the evaluation of the developer and project to determine its suitability for production. If the executive producer is confident the project should go forward, he will negotiate the key terms with the developer and work to help the project meet its first internal green-light or assessment milestone. If the project passes, then the executive producer’s job is to oversee the project’s progress through the reports generated by the associate producers and by looking over builds of the project in progress.
The executive producer is often called upon to maintain the relationship with any licenses and is sometimes involved in contracting external vendors. The executive producer is the person most visible inside the publishing company for the game’s success, while the press and the fans tend to focus on the game developer.

PRODUCER

As a game development studio grows into two teams or larger, the role of the producer becomes critical to the effective execution of the studio’s projects. The producer is the person who will manage the project at a larger development studio, allowing the studio head/executive producer to concentrate on strategic company issues.

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