Your only deadline is the release date, and that is why you are late

Almost none of the indie teams I have seen in Turkey so far have a producer, and most of them do not even know that this is something missing. Usually there is a designer, an artist and a programmer sitting in a three person team, and everyone only knows their own job. One of those three has to own the schedule, the budget and the scope. In this country either everyone is trying to be the producer or nobody wants to take responsibility. In small teams one person being the producer turns into an incredible ego problem, and because of that the timing, the budget and the scope all slip. Plain amateurism.

Tim Cain, who produced Fallout, points at the most misunderstood part of the job. Most people think the game director is at the top of the chain, whereas in a sense it is the producer standing at the top, because they are the one holding everything that is running and making sure it finishes. The hardest part is this, when it is needed the producer has to say even to the game director “your time is up, your money is up, that person is not available any more, do you accept this feature as it is or are we cutting it, decide.”

Who in your team says sentences like that. Probably nobody. Instead the feature sits half done for six months, everyone thinks we will come back and finish it one day, and because nobody makes that decision the decision gets made on its own, and the game ships in that state.

There are people who say “there are three of us, we talk to each other anyway.” This is not a question of how many people you are, it is a question of assigning responsibility. You do not have to hire a separate person for the producer, but somebody has to take that job on.

The most useful idea Cain gives is the derived deadline. The producer tells someone “this has to be done by Friday,” when the real delivery is next month. The next person cannot start until that work reaches a certain maturity, and the one after them cannot start until that is done. So a date months away forces a date this week. Your calendar probably has a demo date and a release date at most.

The second is tracking half finished work. One thing goes into the game while it is waiting for a texture, another goes in because it became testable. Being visible in the game and being finished are not the same thing. Months later you skip past something saying “that one was already in,” and you can find out two weeks before release that it was never actually finished.

The third is that building a schedule needs technical knowledge. Cain uses the 3D pipeline as an example, first it is modelled, then textured, then rigged, then animated, and every stage needs design decisions that were made earlier. The key question is this, after the model is done can one person texture it while another one rigs it. If you do not know the answer you put those two jobs side by side in the schedule and your schedule is wrong from the start. The same person also has to be able to describe that job correctly and hand it to the right person. Both come with industry experience, and that experience works completely differently depending on scale, platform and genre.

This is the biggest reason a decent AA has not even come out of Turkey. In hard skills we have more talent than we need, but there is no producer who came up inside the industry and has touched every area of a game, especially at the AA and AAA level. The producer has to have command of the workflow end to end from the very beginning and take decisions for the good of the game, and those decisions are usually at a large scale. The designer, meanwhile, decides inside the schedule and the scope limits the producer drew. I am not even going into the game director who carries the vision, that is another subject and that role does not exist here either.

The deadlines that really hit indies are the ones nobody imposes on you. Cain’s example is localisation, translation does not start until the text is locked, but if the writers are still changing dialogue that date slips. In the structure he describes there is a producer who calculates that date and puts it down, and you do not have that person. Your equivalents are the store page, the trailer shoot, the build freeze and the festival registration, so there is not even a date to slip because it never gets set in the first place. And nobody reminds you either, because these are your job.

Write schedule next to the name of one person on the team and give that person the authority to cut. Then open the list you have and write next to every item the name of the person waiting on it. The items nobody is waiting on are not actually urgent, and the item two or three people are waiting on is your real deadline, and it probably is not written in your calendar at all.

Your release date is the only date you set, every other date is set by the work itself.