Here (13 megabyte PDF) are the slides from the presentation on game production I gave at ENJMIN on Tuesday, January 11th. The presentation went well, people seemed to like it and remember things from it, and in general it was a very pleasant experience and I was impressed by the students. If you looked at [...]
Intelligent Artifice
Production —
Production and the management of video game projects
Category Archives: Production
Rough structure of my upcoming presentation on production
(Update: I wrote about how the presentation went, and uploaded the slides, in a newer blog post.) Next week I am giving a presentation on production at ENJMIN, a game development school in Angoulême, France. I roughly know what I want to talk about and I’ve been generating a lot of material. I felt I [...]
Principles and Practices for Productive Teams – Slides from my GDC Paris 08 talk
Regular readers may remember that back on June 23rd 2008, I gave a presentation on productivity and being a producer at GDC Paris. Well, I am happy to announce that about 6 months later, I have finally given the slides a final polish and converted them to an accessible format. It only took me a [...]
Daniel Erickson on writing the Old Republic
Gamasutra has a nice interview with Daniel Erickson, the lead writer on Star Wars: The Old Republic at BioWare Austin. Nothing truly new, but a lot of good points that are worth repeating, and an insight into how Bioware handles writing in games. Some extracts, slightly rearranged and emphasis mine: [Writing in games] has to [...]
Slides and videos from IGDA Leadership Forum 2007
A ton of material from the IGDA Leadership Forum 2007 is online now. Videos, slides, summaries… a lot of stuff. I haven’t even started looking through it yet, but the list of sessions looks very tasty: Leadership Track: Building the Perfect Team Leadership Lab Death By 1000 Ideas: Managing Designers and Creatives Managing Engineers Managing [...]
My talk went well
My talk on productivity and producing went well. I arrived five minutes before the start and the room was already packed – I think there were about 100 people. I went a bit slower at the start, adding little anecdotes, and subsequently was surprised when the room guy held up a sign saying “5 minutes [...]
Two simple truths about producers and game designers
Free-lance game designer/producers Most people think they can design games. Most people think they know what preproductions are for. Most people are wrong. As a consequence, I, as a free-lance game designer/producer, don’t get hired to do game design or manage preproduction. I get hired to fix productions that go wrong because the game design [...]
What to do if you don’t have a game designer on your team
A while ago I explained why game design is important. A reader asked in the comments: What do you do if you don’t have a game designer on your team? There are a number of reasons why you might be in this situation: You don’t have the budget for another person on your team. The [...]
More complete, produced game design documents
I just got some more links from Tobi (thanks again). Radical Entertainment, a very well-organized developer in Canada, cooperated with the Computer Science department of the University of Calgary for a computer game programming course. As part of the course, they provided various game documents from their titles: game designs, high concept documents and technical [...]
Complete, produced game design documents
A friend of mine just asked me if I had any complete game design documents of released games lying around. Since I happened to know of a few, and this is not the first time I get asked this question, I figured I might as well turn the answer into a blog post.
