As mentioned last week on November 1st I’ll be resuming my traditional position as Executive Producer and lead designer (the position I held on our previous games) so that someone who can dedicate their full attention to Elemental can succeed me.

My successor, Kael (Derek Paxton), is well known in the Civilization community for Fall from Heaven, a rich, fantasy-based mod. If anyone is qualified to take over the reigns of Elemental, it’s him.

In addition, we recently brought on something we haven’t previously done, an Associate Producer. This is something we should have done on Elemental but we were still structured like we were when our games were just a half dozen people projects. Toby Sarnelle was recently added to the Elemental project to work with Kael. They shall bring order to the chaos.

I want to emphasize that I’m not going anywhere. I’ll still be part of the project and posting plenty but my journals will increasingly be about the part of the game I’ll be involved in most – the computer AI. For v1.1, I’ve started handing the producing efforts to Toby in preparation for Kael’s arrival on November 1.

So how does game design differ from being a producer? Let me give you a few examples from v1.1’s work.

The Design:

v1.1 technology tree has a cavalry sub-tree now. The design calls for the new technologies to give new abilities to your existing cavalry units such as “Charge” and “Evade” (to evade arrows).

Producing:

v1.1 engine doesn’t support adding abilities to existing units. Alternative proposal: Those techs provide new types of mounts: (e.g. War Horse) that do have these abilities.

The Compromise

The Executive Producer thus has to make the call as to whether that is an acceptable workaround or if they are willing to increase the budget and due date for the release in order to extend the engine to support that.

Those are the kinds of calls that have to be made all the time in game development. The challenge is making the right judgment call on when to implement the work around and when to spend the time/money to update the engine. On a new game, this can be perilous (as we have already seen) because you make the wrong call on something and you can cripple the entire game experience. This is why sequels tend to be better because you already have a feeling for what game mechanics will work and which ones won’t.

It’s also why the Designer and the Producer are generally not the same person. Checks and balances. One of my funnest experiences (on development) was with Demigod. On that project, I was the Executive Producer, Mike Marr (GPG) was the designer and Bartosz Kijanka (GPG) was the producer. One of the reasons why Demigod is such a good game was because of how effectively the 3 of us were able to work together.

The importance of the triumvirate

These days, it seems like everyone wants to be a “game designer”. People ask me what does it take to be a game designer? The answer is you had better have a good handle on how games are actually made. Anyone can sit down and whip up a 300 page design document outlining their ultimate sci-fi vs. fantasy real time strategy/RPG/FPS game. What makes someone a good designer is how well they can design something that can actually be made profitably: Time, Scope, Budget. So for starters, make sure you know how to program. Have you ever made your own game? Have you ever made a substantial mod? These are important basic skills to get started. Hence, people who want to be game designers, IMO, should get a degree in computer science or some other technical field – not “game design”.

Similarly, if you want to be a Game Producer, the key skills here are project management. Can you make sure your artists, developers, balancers, etc. are all moving according to schedule? It’s like juggling.

In my case, I’m a good but not great game designer. I’m a good but not great Game Producer. My “special” skill is that I’m good (but not great) across the breadth of game creation. This is an important skill if you want to start your own game studio but can be detrimental once it becomes successful because you need to begin stepping back to replace “good” with “great” at the earliest opportunity and that can be hard to do.

Anyway…

I don’t really have a particular point I’m trying to make in this rambling journal other than to give those of you who are interested in the game industry a glimpse of what things are like.