Today I interviewed Ryan Bond, the best producer I’ve ever worked with, packing a kickass resume. After the dot com crash, Ryan took a job as a video game quality assurance tester at LucasArts in San Rafeal, California (before they got deep sixed by Disney). He did QA on several classic LucasArts games like Galactic Battlegrounds, KoTOR, and Star Wars Galaxies. He went from QA to Associate Producer, Producer, and did a 2 year stint in films as a an associate production manager at a pretty sizable Disney backed studio that was ALSO killed by Disney. Finally he steered into doing smaller "Indie" production, finding a passion for the sort of innovation found only in small game teams.





Star Wars Galactic Battlegrounds





Gabe: The job title “producer” is one we all sort of pretend to understand, but I think the big question is, what the hell is your job?





Ryan: Man, that is the real question. The best answer I can give that isn't 10 pages long, is "getting done whatever needs doing, by whatever means necessary"

Basically, a producer is delivering results.





Gabe: Okay, but if an indie team has a really motivated artist and a really motivated programmer, what do they need you for?





Actual footage of Ryan responding to that question





Ryan: If they plan to do all the work for setting up their bug tracking, asset management, communications platforms; if they plan to do their budget tracking and scheduling; if they plan on doing the pre-release marketing, PR, community management, gameplay demos and teaser videos, relationship with Steam or Gog, dealing with legal paperwork; if they plan on booking travel arrangements for conventions and shows, and organizing the overall trip agenda; if they plan on spending a nice big chunk of their time NOT doing art and NOT doing programming... then, nothing, they don't need a producer.





Gabe: I think those are the things we generally don’t consider. A game is made of code and art so all you really need is code and art, right? It's easy to trivialize things we aren't familiar with. The majority of indie devs haven’t scratched the surface of the things you're talking about, because it all seems like something that either isn't that important or something that can be handled when the time comes. Obviously that just isn't the case.





Indie budgets are always tight though, sometimes expanding a team just isn't an option until funding is secured. While a team is working toward that goal, what systems should they be considering





Ryan: I think before looking at specific tools or platforms, the end result needs to be identified. Kind of the "first principles" thing that Elon Musk is always going on about, I guess.





In my experience, one thing that will cause a lot of stress, confusion, and wasted time and effort, is not having a central place for ALL tasks that are to be done. Big studios use production trackers like Jira . Small studios often use things like Trello , or even just a google spreadsheet. But you have to have some central place for all the odds and ends. And most importantly, you have to keep that fucker CLEAN! You gotta GROOM it. Don't want nasty subfeatures and subtasks all tangled up and incomprehensible. Don't want little dust bunnies of forgotten notes and bugs drifting around in some long neglected "sprint container pre-milestone 4 warmup week 1" category.





A central task list is key, but ahead of that you need to understand your workflow, your work routine, and your cadence. I've seen teams get so wrapped up in the process, that that ITSELF becomes the game, and they never get even a basic first playable done. So there's a balance between process and progress, and each team and each game will have different sweet spot.





Gabe: I love the term cadence here. I’ve been apart of so many teams that feel like really bad jazz, everyone trying to blare whatever their role is, only dealing with other contributors as much as they have to. Resulting in total nonsense.





A lot like music, that cadence has to be different for every team. Are there any best practices for finding the rhythm so to speak?





Ryan: Yep. It's defining a period of work, and what will go into that period, from each contributor, so that they all come together nicely at the end of the period.





In Agile terms, it's a "sprint". Agile is such a loaded thing, since almost everyone does it poorly, but most of the principles come from a good place. And one of the best, is to define a block of time, define the goals you want to have done at the end, define the tasks that need to happen to get there, estimate if you have basically enough working time in that period to meet the goals, then if all looks good, GO.





Gabe: All of these steps in theory sound so achievable. Yet I've worked for plenty of clients failing at each and every one. Why do you think teams are so prone to ignore or fall out of practice with this stuff?





Ryan: Because it sounds simple but it's hard to keep up in practice. That's a really good question, "why do these things fall apart". And I guess maybe that goes back to your first question. When the deadlines are right there and shit's flying all over the place, it needs to be someone's job to keep the systems online and the people using them.

I will say, that the simpler you set things up, the less likely they will be to fall apart. Get as simple as you can with process, but no simpler!





Gabe: Discipline and organization seem to be the recurring themes here. With individuals focused specifically on their profession, not considering the implications of each tiny bit of mess they make along the way, the game slowly becomes chaos. I think there is a common misconception that this sort of mess is just apart of being indie, but the fact is it doesnt need to be.









Ryan: You nailed it that people assume it's just normal for things to be chaotic and disorganized. And I think at the end of a project, that is usually true, the project looks like the end of Animal House. The trick though, is that if you get to that point well before you ship, you're gonna have a real hard time shipping. If you start organized, and practice staying organized, focused, and relatively tidy, then you can stave off that hurricane-came-through mess until the end when you can still get the game over the line. If it hits too soon, or is a constant presence on the project, you're gonna spend more time cleaning up than moving forward, and then you're screwed





The best producers I know, tend to share a few key qualities, and those are:

- Pure endurance. They do not give up, they get the job done. Masochists.

- Ability to deal with just about any type of personality. Programmer speak, marketing speak, therapy, drinking buddy, explaining long absences to a loved one...

- Extreme levels of organization under extremely short timelines

- A love, a passion, a devotion to games and all they offer







