The Pre-Production Problem - How to Improve the Planning Process in Game Design - Extra Credits
Вставка
- Опубліковано 15 тра 2012
- Pre-production in game development has an unfortunate side effect of hurting programmers and killing productivity. We can look to the animation industry as an example of how to improve pre-production practices in game studios.
Subscribe for new episodes every Wednesday! bit.ly/SubToEC (---More below)
(Original air date: July 27, 2011)
Check out Molly's artwork here!
www.mollymaloney.com
_______
Get your Extra Credits gear at the store! bit.ly/ExtraStore
Play games with us on Extra Play! bit.ly/WatchEXP
Watch more episodes from this season of Extra Credits! bit.ly/2n8QcIn
Contribute community subtitles to Extra Credits: ua-cam.com/users/timedtext_cs_p...
Talk to us on Twitter (@ExtraCreditz): bit.ly/ECTweet
Follow us on Facebook: bit.ly/ECFBPage
Get our list of recommended games on Steam: bit.ly/ECCurator
_________
Would you like James to speak at your school or organization? For info, contact us at: contact@extra-credits.net
_________
♪ Intro Music: "Penguin Cap" by CarboHydroM
bit.ly/1eIHTDS
♪ Outro Music: "Gypsy Jazz" by Adrian Holovaty
ocremix.org/remix/OCR01466/ - Ігри
Your suggestion reminds me of a kangaroo's reproductive system. At any given moment, a female kangaroo in her reproductive prime will typically have three joeys in development - an older joey who has left the pouch but still sticks his head in to nurse, a newborn joey who is perpetually nursing, and a fertilized egg that is paused waiting for the right time to implant. By the time the older joey weans, the newborn is ready to leave the pouch. At that point, the fertilized egg is unpaused and the pregnancy begins. Immediately after giving birth a few weeks later, the female mates with another male and gets another egg ready.
+Ettina Kitten Not at all the metaphor I would've expected, but it seems to work! XD
+Ettina Kitten So kangaroos are eternally giving birth? why arent we being invaded by kangaroos yet?
+leonidas56 They don't have the military prowess of Emus.
+leonidas56 Because Australlia.... It's sort of isolated....
+leonidas56 Because young kangaroos also have a lot of predators after them? Generally when a species have a high birth frequency, it's to compensate for something.
Programmers should be doing prototyping during pre-production! Give us the freedom to create one feature at a time, learn what works - and then the freedom throw out that code entirely, try again and again, until we can do it RIGHT during production. Of course nobody wants to pay a programmer to write code that's not going into the product. But it reduces the number of bugs we have to fix later and improves the overall final quality.
there lives a problem....the ideas from pre-production maybe don`t match with programmers ideas. So, its necessary a well established communication and a lot of time (tell me if Im wrong)
For that matter if you've decided on an engine just let the programmers go wild familiarizing themselves with the engine and middleware as much as they can. Demo projects, study time, whatever floats their boat.
FRC taught me something this year that may solve the "what do programmers do" ordeal. The truth is, _anyone_ might just have a grand idea, so getting literally everyone involved in the project (or at least everyone that's involved before hiring the masses) to brainstorm and grind out preproduction ideas is helpful. I myself am a programmer for my team, and I nearly had the final idea for our robot this year. My point is, programmers don't jist have to program, same for anyone else. In my humble opinion, *_everyone_* should be involved in the very first planning stages
wundrweapon I like your idea (was on FLL and a lot of my friends are in FRC and FTC), but I don't think that system will work for the game indestry. you see- the indestry is what it is- an indestry. a proggrammer in FTC is still a kid, who did not do any graduations or things like that which means they are in (sort of) equal skills for this. Whatsoever, in the gaming indestry, people actually spent years getting degrees in these things, and some people with some other degrees do very different jobs, for better or worse.
wither way, valid point and nice thinking!
btw, not native english speaker, so sorry for any mistakes....
Your idea carries truth, but is not practical or efficient.
Imagine a school that is ran by all members' idea, including the cook's view on how kids should be taught physics?
Small teams work fine in this system, but as you develop an enterprise with clear-cut jobs and a massive pipeline, having too many people speaking their minds start to hinder production past the healthy point of brainstorming.
Marcotonio you do bring up fair points, but there's another clear line you're missing: the game devs vs. most other industries. in game development, everyone gets involved in it in some way. the programmers, designers, artists, etc. are all making the same thing. a school chef is not a physics teacher, so they're not involved in the same closed-loop system. that's why robot building, game development, etc. have this advantage - nobody's job is too different from the end goal.
and besides, not every view needs to be _incorporated_ but rather considered
Fair enough! I agree every branch of the pipeline has some grasp on all other areas. But I still think it's not feasible to have this much interdisciplinarity in all departments. Some workers are bound to be codemonkeys, some will be drawhorses, and even though some of them might have good insight, some of them will also have poor tact for the overall balance in things, being good only at the task they are paid to.
I'm an cinema/animation major with some dabbling in videogames and I found out most visual artists and programmers I've worked with had really poor self-evaluation when it came to brainstorming. They love the media, they consume it and even produce it frequently, but they lack critical sense that a person more focused on, say, storyboarding and screenwriting (for a movie) might have. That's what happens in the Japanese industry of anime, for instance, where the working force (animators) has low standards in matters of content: i.imgur.com/BlHeP67.jpg
If these guys' opinions would be taken in account, hours and hours would be wasted convincing them their original character SHADOW_MAGEXXX666 the Hedgehog is not a cool addition to the game.
What can be done is having "chiefs" of each sector working close together on the pre-production phase, but that still leaves the main bulk of more task-oriented workers out of the equation.
The solution to that, I believe, would be better training these skills by promoting internal projects and letting them go wild where there isn't money at stake, but that leads us to another problem.... which I'm discussing on this tree, if you'll join me: ua-cam.com/video/ukADFPuscG8/v-deo.html&lc=z13qifugjoy4fpaxr04cfpvhevi3y14g0zk0k
I just wanted to pipe in and add that I agree with the OP to a certain extent. As a dev myself, I run into this problem a lot when I'm doing contract work on a project that had all the preproduction done by non-programmers. Sure, in a large studio, the people working in preproduction can have enough experience to know how to consider the technical side of things, but I have NEVER worked on a project where preproduction was done entirely by creative folk that worked out well financially. The whole team wastes way too much time and money and it hurts the game. On the flipside, the projects I follow (never worked on one though), that started with all programmers tend to run smoothly, but don't seem to break barriers or innovate on creative gameplay that well. There's something to be said for dreamers who won't take no for an answer.
A little long-winded, but basically I wanted to chime in and say that bringing people in on all levels for preproduction could solve a hell of a lot of problems for small to medium size studios. And in large studios, bringing in a select few proven individuals from all experience levels and departments might not be a bad idea either.
Ironically, I've been using a lot of my real estate investing tricks in starting my first game. I'm in the preproduction phase right now. Using your videos to help brainstorming, using a format I developed to develop blueprints and things-to-do lists, and while I'm still unsure of what engine I will use, or what art style will be chosen, I'm already talking with other producers to get quotes and make arrangements so that when it's time to hit the ground running, I can throw jobs at people who are well suited for the gig, and I can focus on my tasks without getting bogged down. As a small fry, I do have a personal rule to never undermine or lowball my team. Anyone who is worth their salt deserves respect and remuneration. And there are a lot of creative ways to structure the finances of an operation.
I WISH all of animation worked like Pixar. Go to television animation, it's just like film. Sucks having to find something every time your project goes on hiatus.... especially when you're not in LA and so don't have the Animator's guild helping you with health insurance.
I like the way Pixar does things. This is definitely worth a try. This is a problem I don't have to deal with personally. I don't have the kind of time or money pressure large companies have. I do a lot of preproduction. It was fine at first, because it helps me learn. Then I get to the point where my ideas are as good as they will ever be. Then I am ready to build it. For example, I explored so many ins and outs of a battle system, I am ready to write all the rules down together. It haven't done this yet because I am still working on creature design. Still the time will come where I can write the battle system. Then I can go from there. I can develop story, items and the geography.
I know I'm by no means someone to look to as an example as an unemployed college drop out who hasn't finished a single project yet due to scope creep, but here's something I'm trying with my development "team": I always have at least two projects in development that I drift between. Not necessarily two games, but two projects. I just poke projects and am basically in a constant state of pre-production for any given project, but always ensuring that at least one is active at any given time. Skill-wise, I'm low productivity on just about anything because of my lack of focus, but I'm pretty good at constant outpouring of ideas and good-naturedly pestering people. Maybe it'll work out well for us or maybe we'll crash and burn. If it doesn't crash and burn, then I guess that's somewhat of a solution to this problem. Problem is, I don't think that sort of model would scale well at the middling level of game development. Indie dev it might work, big developer it might work, it's basically just having a pre-production specialist who coordinates multiple smaller teams. Any mid-level company without the freedom of indie dev to take risks or the budget of a big developer might not be able to make this work. I'd be interested to see someone try though, cos people like me are probably unemployable in traditional roles of game dev and it'd be nice to see a field open up for people like me.
EDUCATION! That's your solution. Plan for training for your developers. There is ALWAYS something new to learn. Cross train people, train on new technologies, let them be creative with hackathons or brown bags. Problem solved.
Exactly, man. The game industry is very messy. We need some chances to learn how to be efficient workers.
In most cases proper education on most topics for all of the programmers would still cost quite a bit of money, not quite as much as the downtime though. It would definitely work but to save money I think the best idea could be found if you used that in tandem with other efficient but not truly complete methods of solving the problem.
L D B Well, I was thinking less like a college course and more like a game jam-esque situation.
I agree with the game jam idea. You always learn something new, be it about your specific role or the overall process of making a game. Plus its fun!
While I would really love this and the next project ahead will benefit from it, this also means that the downtime in productivity for your developers will be even more expensive ...
And we know our dear gaming industry, they don't want to think a few month ahead and see that this might be money well spent.
Here's my thought:
The difference between games and animation or film is that the product lives and changes after its release. Bug are discovered, weird story dead-ends that players discover have to be addressed, black hats hack into a game and it needs defending.
My idea, then, is this: After a game is finished, designate some time for the original programmers to head up customer support and debugging. Don't put the leads on these tasks, or if you do, pick other people to be leads on the next project. Create a window where the original programmers are the ones handling not just the programming corrections and bug fixes, but the contacts from customers.
While this is going on for say, 2-3 months, begin pre-production on the next game with a handful of lead developers.
Customer support can be stressful, but it's a different kind of stress versus the initial development process.
The problem here might be te cost of having a software developer be... Well... Not developing software. Not that it wouldn't be great to do strong and fast debugging, but I'm guessing it isn't done because the cost is too high.
Also, if I were a company I would have pre-planning done on the next game by the time the current one is done, like EC suggests. It would not only increase output quality, but even give a chance to train the programmers that stood out in the previous project to lead future ones.
Still, debugging exists. Does anyone know how that mind of post-release work is done currently?
Manuel Perez But that was the point of the piece. You can't do pre-production at the end of the production cycle because there's too much work to do, and you can't do pre-production after the game is launched because you end up with idle programmers.
My idea gives idle programmers something to do. And while they aren't programming something new, they *are* programming. And likely creating more satisfied customers in the process.
Eliot Hochberg The problem with that is that you're assuming the company has that type of money to spend debugging software past their requirement time. No matter what, the programmer is getting paid. And if the studio is paying a programmer without themselves getting paid, they are actively losing money on a programmer who is, in essence, making them no money at all. Unless it can be demonstrated to the studio that the cost of debugging past release would be worth it (Battlefield 4) and would garner more sales, they will more than likely be unwilling to do so.
Eliot Hochberg You're assuming that they don't already test games with Alpha's and Beta's. The issue is that Publishers will often have set dates for a product to be finished and if it's not finished they lose like millions of dollars. So you basically have to ship before you're ready which is why we get shipped games that are super buggy on release but get cleaned up within the first few months. I also think people misunderstand the proces of debugging its not like you find a bug and there's just some magical fix. I think that if people better understood the process with which games are made they would be more sympathetic to developers.
I don't see how my solution is prevented by your response.
Even with alpha and beta testing, bugs get through, precisely because of the schedules you reference.
So why not have the bulk of the programmers continue to handle the bug reports and fixes, and peel off a select group to begin work on the next project while the initial bugs are identified and corrected?
Currently in pre-production with a fun and playable tabletop prototype. The hard part is having enough time to change your mind
This has helped me so much, I just realised I'm in this phase and need to step up a gear. Cheers!
..Can't we just get a seperate team JUST for pre-production? You have your animators and modellers working on the game models/animation, you have the programmers working on the engine and mechanics and such, etc. etc., why can't we make a group of 'pre-production'-ers to do pre-production work in the meantime, for any upcoming project? You don't need anyone to do any other work, everyone can specialize on their own thing, and the pre-production-ers can work on the pre-production for an upcoming project. What I'm basicly saying is, hire people specifically for pre-production WHILE you know there's enough time left before release/starting a new project.
Likely because production groups need to be able to consult on the viability of stuff introduced in preproduction: what if something is planned that would take much longer than estimated by the preproduction staff or if something is flat-out impossible?
+RhythmGameAddict Those problems still come up without preproduction and cost in terms of lost work (unused code and assets) is dramatically higher.
However, you make a good point about the diversity necessary in a good pre-production team: have a designer who codes, one who's done sound, and one who'd done art, etc. (preferably people who acquired those skills on your team). Then they can be an advocate for the different teams that need to make all those ideas happen.
Also, no one says the preproduction plan is set in stone, it's just complete enough that everyone can start work on the game, while the design issues that cause disagreement are modified.
+Cyler s, +Machin Shin, +Marcus Mattern, +RhythmGameAddict, +Cowfaic'd Realm, +Extra Credits.
For the smaller studios they could higher people who are just learning their craft which could either be hobbyists who participated in a game jam or someone who just finished their training/school. They would work back and forth between the Pre-Production and the programmers during the current project. In this situation these people can take on more simple roles as they are mainly there to keep communication going between the more experienced workers.
My reasoning for this is they are able to learn how games are made as well they can learn if they are truly interested in the position they were studding or if they seen something else that's more interesting.
For the Massive studios they can use people with more knowledge as well as some basic experience. They could have just come out of school or been apart of smaller games.
Lastly hen the current game is getting ready for publishing and the new one is about to start production this group can move up into positions they would like to work for. You could also cycle some of the other staff to be apart of communicating or Pre-Production if they feel burned out from finishing the last game.
+Cowfaic'd Realm It might just be me, but it seems likely that changing the head of a project from the lead pre-production designer to the lead production designer could easily lead to details being lost from the "vision". Trying to teach someone else to create something you imagined probably isn't as easy as creating it yourself. Besides, I doubt the people pre-producing something like _Bioshock_ or _Portal_ are eager to hand it off to someone else...
You kinda get two? Two main problems.
One is expertise and familiarity with a given project. To an extent you can transfer the time spent on it to new people but that's going to take time itself and it's going to lose a lot of the tangential ideas that weren't there for the final concept that could come up and be useful. Even then like the people who did the pre-production are still going to be the foremost experts on the game for a lot of the game's early development so that's just lost time.
Like you /can/ do it but you're bleeding man hours basically.
Two is ownership. It's maybe not talking about a lot in education but it comes up a good amount in progressive business in my experience at least. People who feel genuine ownership for their work rather than that they are just a cog in the machine tend to be more dedicated and more productive and produce better products. By switching out the core cast of people planning the game you really hurt your ability to get that ownership.
I really like a model that's similar to the pixar one he mentioned in the video where you have core teams rotating (Pixar specifically has a few sets of core teams that rotate) but where instead you develop those cores from within your staff for each project. While multiple projects are in production you can have designers or other team members pitch projects and if any get approved they can shave off and begin pre-production, then as their pre-production ends you phase it into full production aggregating staff from either company growth or other projects slowing down. It means you can't have the full staff crunch time and you have to depend more on strong producers to wind and control projects but it gives every game exactly what it needs and with regular reviews on whether it needs to be stopped and the staff phased into other projects.
What if...and this is a crazy idea...but what if you have short meetings or open-door policy on ideas so that while you work on smething, you could run down or call in to tell someone about an idea or thought about the next game?
Sadly, I can't hear this episode, all that is going on in my head is that damn "Reproduction" song from Grease 2, but with an additional P added to the refrain
watching this show convinces me to study fir something in gamedevelopment. thank you guys so much for indirectly helping me with this decision
While working on our project, ran across this and... THIS, all this, all the way. We are a new studio, and going through pre-production right now. We expected, originally, to finish in December, but opportunities presented themselves so we're extending it. We have a new deadline which we now look to be ahead of schedule, and when we are finished we should be very polished indeed.
I like the idea of pre production teams. I also like the idea of smaller games peppered in between the gigantic AAA games. A smaller game would allow some of your Devs to still be busy while larger games are in pre production. and once the small game is out you could put that staff onto the growing needs of the larger game.
I have been in preproduction for a project for almost 2 years because I am still learning how to make games, and only when I finish the course I am right now I will start the production fase. My project changed a lot alredy
I'd be inclined to say that the answer to this may lie in DLC and perhaps accepting a bit more overhead in the design department.
DLC offers the whole team something to do post-launch but it can be scaled to avoid requiring some designers, programers and artists to split off and move into pre-production. This isn't the case with all DLC but if you look at Eugen's free DLC for their Wargame series I think it's clear that they're designed to avoid requiring a whole team while still giving some programmers, designers and artists something to work on. Obviously designing the scope and workload of each DLC product to fit the reduced workforce will be all the more important, feature creep won't just be bad for the scheduling of the DLC launch but possibly involve compromising the pre-production going on and thus the whole point of the exercise.
Given this imperative, and the fact that design staff are going to be spread thin during this period I think accepting having a few more Game Designers on staff would be needed so that there's enough to guide the post-launch DLCs and run pre-production effectively, and I suspect that the number of added bodies involved will be an order of magnitude less then the would-be idle programmers. I can't imagine that during the production run that it would be impossible to find enough to do for a few extra Game Designers, if nothing else having one or two work on laying the groundwork for DLC plans or for pre-production should do.
The side benefit of this is that a programmer-heavy DLC team will, in a well run Development Studio, be able to fix bugs and the like more aggressively then I imagine a pruned-down 'patches only' team would be able to so that games with a lot of potential but a buggy launch ( looking at you Rome 2 ) can be more easily brought to a reasonably good end-state. Also there's a lot of potential for free DLC aimed at providing/improving mod support for games well suited to that.
So *THAT'S* WHY INDIE GAMES ARE BETTER!
I don't think you can flat out say they're better.
*****
Just go with the joke, man. ;)
XerxesTexasToast I would love to but then I remember GUISE OF THE WOLF and DAY ONE GARRY'S INCIDENT exists and I forget to say indies are better because I am too busy trying to keep the scissors from my jugular XD
Food for thought: 2K has roughly 7 months between WrestleMania and the release deadline. So between October 31 and March 31, They could have their devs releasing DLC of new superstars and such to keep the player occupied until the next game can be put on the shelf. Not only would this occupy the programmers and character devs, this would also buy plenty of time to plan the next project. And by the time you're ready to mash all this stuff into a big ball, playtest and ship, You'll already have premade characters and everything because you really just needed to throw some extra sauce onto the last game and ditch some really bad mechanics that no one ever touched anyway. Most game studios can do this.
Myself being a budding developer at the time, have found these videos very useful. Plus, existing companies could learn from this too. If 1 good game has "well spent" pre-development, they could be able to get a name for themselves (in the case of a budding company) or, greater the name that they already have to release better versions of the game. This of course bringing more consumers. I know this was long but, hopefully I can give helpful insight as well.
Every time I end up watching an Extra Credits video I end up splurging on them for hours and hours. I want to go play some of these games but i keep learning.
The whole "what do you do with the programmers" issue reminds me of my school's Robotics club... where I'm the lead programmer. We spent, like, three months in the design phase, where I did practically nothing. I looked up stuff on the internet when a teammate needed to know the dimensions of something, I did research on the sort of tools I was gonna be programming for... but those were all quick things that I tended to finish in five minutes and spent the rest of the hour that we met that week looking for the next thing to do. It wasn't until stuff actually began to be built that the team had any idea what they wanted me to code up and I actually did anything useful. And, believe me, I tried to help during the design phase, but I was put into my position because I'm just a natural at programming- I have little relevant experience with designing robots, meaning that I didn't understand the relevance of most of what they were arguing about. Whenever I tried to help, it was just me asking a stupid question in the hopes that they'd somehow missed that minor piece that made an entire idea work or fail.
It kinda helps to know that the issue of unused programmers is an issue in the field I actually want to go into, too, not just the field I'm in now. It motivates me a bit more to help find a solution.
I think this explains why there's no Half-life 3.
+Olors SixtyFoar Wow, like, actually though. I heard that, the way things are set up over at Valve, anyone works on any project they like, and there has just been very little traffic on Half Life 3.
+X-Blade Wielder I need to get into valve
+Olors SixtyFoar no it's because valve is allergic to the number 3
omer shaik Gaben: "One, two, th-ACHSHITSNEEZE"
***** I guess you could say it took... *forever* to come out...
I'll be leaving now
Thanks! I appreciate it.
I wonder how Nintendo manages their programmers. It works on so many projects at a time, so does it just shuffle its programmers to new projects after one is completed?
yeah i wonder this too... are they really working 12 hours for 7 days a week like in the other video???
man it must be hard....
A good bit of this is done by having several different studios for each game they have in production.
Japanese work mentality... work 15 + hours a day, party hard at night, power nap... repeat!
do it, do it right, do it fast!
Steve Jobs used to discard many projects and only work on a few (1-3) potential projects, which i think Nintendo should do.
Nintendo has many studios, I think that each studio rarely works on more than 1 game at the same the same time (and I suspect that when a studio works in two games, they have a very small team in a preproduction for the next game).
For example, Nintendo Studio 3 has released all the Zelda games since 2003, and all the games that Studio 3 does are Zelda, they took on average 2 years per game.
Someone should put every episode of extra credits on to blu-ray discs and ship them to every video game related person or company there is. developers, publishers, consumers... they could all benefit from these videos.
I think the best example is the software business (not gaming software) because its interdisciplinar and its a bit older and more mature than the game industry, and there is planning before starting with a project.
Also, i think its important to see that (i've never worked in the game industry) agile methods of creating a product are very important to use and i don't know if the game studios are all using them.
I work for a pretty well-known indie game company, and we pretty much follow the Pixar model -- at any given time, we're juggling two or three projects at once, which means there's ALWAYS something that needs doing. Usually when we're shipping one thing, something else is headed down the pipeline, and yet another thing is in its pre-production phase. I'm not sure how well it works (mostly because I've never seen any other method in action), but I know that our products tend to be pretty well-written and planned out, thanks in part to this method of doing things. It also means that our creatives -- our concept artists, our writers -- and our programmers are never out of things to be working on.
As I said in the episode on buggy games, this is why I (usually) prefer the low-key and indie games to the AAA industry. Games should be an form of art and entertainment, not just an assembly-line carte blanche to print money; games like The World Ends With You and Cave Story have far more genuine passion put into their work then whatever they call the most recent Call of Duty. That, and I’m not that fond of many of the most common AAA genres, especially FPSs, and my restriction to the DS line, Wii, and iOS means I can’t play a lot of AAA games even if I wanted to.
I don't work in the game industry but I am starting to work in the planning industry (ok that sounded better before I said it out loud but I'll explain). There is something out there called the "Project Management Institute" or PMI in North America. I know the UK has their own version but there is some serious overlap between the two. Basically it's designed for non-industry specific best practices for planning and monitoring a projects lifecycle. Many of the core problems here are addressed in the training, though I'm not convinced that the solutions provided directly copy paste to be solutions for the game industry but hey might be worth checking out. Watching the video I was already using the PMI terminology (example senior production team in planning would be the "Subject Matter Experts" or SMEs on a project) and fitting it into a scheduling chart in my head (yeah I need a hobby leave me alone). It won't be a 100% fix straight away but it should help alleviate some of the problems. After all making a game is really just a project.
Rebellion games does this, generally working on 3 to 5 projects in different stages at any one time. One will be the next title to release and will have a big team, one will be in early production and waiting for people to become available, one will be in preproduction/prototyping. I think it shows in how consistently polished their games are.
Midway through the video, I had already conceived of a way to solve the problem; immediately afterward, you described how Pixar has done so, which was my plan exactly. I don't really see why it would be that difficult to set up a design company in the same way Pixar is but, granted, I'm not a designer, so I might be totally wrong.
the solution would be to make the important bits early and something less important late. not only does this allow polish of the important features as the workload eases off near the end but you can begin pre-production of your next project
What you do with programmers? Have them do everything that you need technically done that isn't a game. Web design, for instance. Bug-fix older projects that just got released (there are usually way more bugs right after release than far after release), So say you had 30 programmers. 10 are doing useful things for the current project, maybe 5 are working on web design. 10 are bug fixing the last project. 5 could be doing whatever else you need done with your technical systems.
would you tell an airplane mechanic to fix a submarine?
***** It may be slower work, but it's still work. Even if you have to make them work with actual web designers, it's better than break time.
TristanBomb the point he was trying to make is not all programming is the same; just because they can code doesn't mean they can do everything related to programming.
blaze595 yes, exactly!
blaze595 I'm aware of that. I've done some coding myself and my dad is the IT Architect at his work. He can work with webservices but if I asked him to draw something on-screen he couldn't do it. That said, it would only take him 10 minutes to find out because he knows the basics and knows exactly where to look.
For starters, the main mastermind of this wonderful series along with his/her team behind them should take initiative in doing just what you described.
You're right. Extra Credits video clips are absolutely brilliant and the video game industry along with the hundreds of millions and possibly even billions of video game enthusiasts+consumers, including the uninitiated
(people who don't play video games) could benefit from these around the globe!
its exactly what im learning in my OOAD class :D
1:56 Good ol' XKCD.
I have a friend who works on games (not gonna say his company or name cause he doesn't want me to) who has a good idea. He put it best when he said:
"I don't even think about pitching ideas unless I can take my idea and write at least 50 pages on how it works, and how it's story works, and it's world, and so on. Usually a lot more. That way if I can get an idea of it, it can become a project with ease even if my scribbles are ignored, because if an idiot like me can write a substantial amount of background, the rest of my team can figure it out."
I will say he works on a small team, but he is really thorough.
i never realized this is a problem, thx for the vid
Currently in pre-production, research and prototyping, i know way too well how invaluable this time is seen and used.. Specially when i know how much more effective the actual production is when these problems are solved before they are implemented:"we'll figure it out later in production"..
I used to work in theatre and event production, seeing how messed up game production can be.. It's a pain.. Stages are planned months ahead of time, each centimeter, each nut and bolt is planned so you can put that show in place in hours. If we would've thought "we'll figure it out later" the friday night shows would be ready around next thursday. Pre-production just isn't a thing you can sidestep, more you plan ahead of execution, the less time you have to use to employ lots of people and the better chances you have that all that is planned, is produced.
It's worth noting that thanks to digital distribution a project no longer has to end as soon as it ships. This is one of those areas where DLC can be a positive thing! One possibility is to complete project A, then split off some team members from project A to do pre-production on project B while the remainder of the project A team builds DLC for project A. Obviously this only works for some projects, but it might be worth keeping in mind.
If there are people such as the programmers not working during pre-production, why not include them in the world design/story design process, in order to get them better situated with the possible mechanics they're going to be working with? After all, the games industry is based around the idea that good and specific communication ends up with more efficient work.
So how do we couple this with the "Fail Faster" concept? I'm confused D:
I dont work in the game industry or animation, but I think the Pixar model would work pretty well with some minor tweaks.
why not have all hands on for the beginning of a game, lets say a month or two, just to get everything rolling. Get a general art style going, maybe the start of a mechanic or two, just till things settle down from the initial rush. Then pull a small pre-production team out of the staff, maybe 1-2 people from each part. This would have the main staff working on the game and the preproduction staff setting up for a new title before anything gets hectic. When the pre-production staff gets done with what is needed (again, i dont work in these industries and dont know how much needs to be accomplished during preproduction) they can then be transferred back to the current project.
Really, i think this might work simply because it puts an inherent deadline on the pre-production: the sooner they get done, the sooner they can get back in with everyone else on the current project. Plus, it would still give you all hands on deck at the end of the project. now, the biggest problem i can see with this model would be the pre-production staff trying to rush through just to get back to the current project (though the reverse could easily be true as well), so, to correct this, you could have a minimum amount of time they have to spend in pre-production, say 3 months and say they have to be finished no later then 3 months before the end of the current games development (again, these are total guesses, not my industry). any thoughts from some devs out there on this idea? id love to better understand what you guys do and how you get it done.
That's why many successful triple-A studio's nowadays make their core-team produce a stream of DLC for a year or two and then bundle all that extra content in a "platinum edition".
In the 90's, early 00's it used to be about producing new games as quickly as possible so your games always have the latest graphics. Nowadays graphics isn't evolving as quickly as it used to, so it's more about milking the product cycle as much as possible.
I'm an aspiring developer and I DO looove talking about how my game is going to be xD I'm setting myself a deadline right now to be done an early access version by the end of this year at the very latest just because I don't know how intense college is going to be for me personally. is this too long? it is just me coding
TheSomeoneXD yeah that's kinda what I've been doing.
TheSomeoneXD u a dev too?
TheSomeoneXD I did for a while too. trust me you want an engine. I know unity in personal is free but I also know unreal engine is bigger on platforms other than mobile. the Cong isn't too much more different, it's just learning what the new functions do etc.
How'd that deadline work out, OP?
I'm making a new game actually. It's been in the pre-production phase for over a year. This has given me a lot of time to think of new content and change some not so good ideas.
What about agile methodologies used for software development, do they apply for videogames?
The best recent example of this is project TITAN that was in the pre-production phase for 17 years after they finally gave up on it they used the remaining assets and some ideas to make OVERWATCH infact the game is soo much a comeback to life story that overwatch was supposed to be the task force in project titan
I've had the problem of pre-planning, worst case scenario by time I get to building I've overwhelmed myself.
Its hard to think that an idea will do, its too easy to get discouraged when you see your idea done by someone else or when you relate your idea to other games or even when you just think your idea is not enough.
I can definitely say, starting game dev is a monster of a journey, but I'd kill if I could make minimum wage from it.
they addressed that issue, hiring from project to project is a nightmare for both employee and employer.
Drawing from my experience in the game industry, I agree with you that there is usually little to no time put aside in preproduction. Usually most of the people assigned to pre-production stage of the project are artists. Game designers work on projects that are deemed more important and are brought in when the new project proves itself to the brass. And there are at most 2 or 3 programmers working on the fledgling game. Like with the designers more will be brought in when it proves itself and the other projects are finished. I agree with you, if enough time is spent in pre-production the game will be awesome. It's better to know what features there are going to be from the start than to worry how to change your code later on the development process.
1st
What if you had your team or pool of programmers and two development teams, one keeping the programmers busy, the other one planning the next project? Or would that shift the downtime towards the development teams too much?
DICE has somewhat done this. They were working on BF4 since before BF3 released. While they kept some programmers and developers on BF3 to keep it fresh, balanced, and relatively smooth, many of the team were already planning out BF4 and how it would look, what features it would include, and how to really make a new game that still instilled the ideals of the BF franchise. Not to mention they have already stated they will be making battlefront and mirrors edge 2.
programmers can give feedback in the pre production phase. They are some of the smartest people in the industry. True their arts skills aren't there but they can give good feedback for game ideas and implementation. Its good to have everyone give feedback even HR lol. Every staff should be active at all times.
That last solution I was thinking would be the ideal.
I have a great idea and a small team that are interested in making a game but I keep running into the problem of getting stuck in preproduction. i am ready to work and trying to set deadlines but my team refuses to follow. any suggestions?
Game development is much like a team-sport. However, injured players or those sitting it out are similar to those in the production team with nothing to do yet or are less busy. The only difference is that players sitting on the bench can replace those currently playing in case of a switch or someone else gets injured; a production team is a limited resource of participants that a limited budget can't afford to be wasting much needed time.
It is as if everyone on the team is injured, tired and not much time left in the game to insure a win.
"Gypsy Jazz" reminded me of Gladkov's themes for Plastilinovaya Vorona animated shorts :D
I was thinking about that second idea early in the first idea.
What I imagine for an ideal pre-production is create a draw pool from your employees. The members drawn get a sort of extended lunch break. During the first half of their break they eat and hang out as per normal, but then when lunch break ends that group is to brainstorm. The brainstorm need not be just on one game. Notes are taken of all the ideas and on the next day the ideas are handed off to the next group. Then towards the end of one production the employees vote on the next game to be produced and the group focuses refining the ideas for that game.
Wouldn't that lead to the familiar situation where too many cooks spoil the broth, though?
It could, but with the final group you would have to solidify the members for revising the ideas. Unlike a broth ideas can be taken out, and refined. I think a better comparison is having a culinary connoisseur visit many different restaurants and sample things, including several items that are the same and several that are bad. Then he cooks up something that tastes great with his accrued knowledge. Man I bet that guy could whip up some mean Nachos.
Super helpful
As an indie dev, I have a question since this video is mostly about large teams. My "preproduction" was the creation of a story concept and deciding what the characters would look like, and what kind of mechanics I wanted. I'm currently writing a plot and creating a first draft of the whole game (I'm using RPG Maker by the way), then I plan to go through the game and do a second draft, fixing bugs and making things flow and work better, once those two things are finished.
Do you have any advice for me? I also have thought of several other stories I'd like to make into games.
How do you become a concept artist and what skills should you have to do this?
"the more of a game you build the more you relize you could have done it better" this is the painful truth that I experienced through my game developing. Fortunately I working on my hobby project so I can rebuild it as much as I want. It's getting better everytime but I never go beyond character control and animation because I never get satified with what I have done. I enjoyed it anyway. ^^
"The next Valve, Bioware, or Blizzard"
Wow, remember when they made good games?
(Half Life Alyx was cool though)
Yeaah the Blizzard part didn't age too well.
Very eye-opening!
Where is that demotivational from at the beginning of the video? I want to save it somewhere, it's hilarious for me.
Running a game company like an animation studio is a great way to look at it.
Adrian Holovaty for the outro! Woot!!
I recall hearing that The Elder Scrolls Online has been an idea of Bethesda's since Oblivion.
This means that right out of the go, they're probably doing pre-production years before, and even while the current title in a series comes in, especially with all the story they have to write alongside gameplay. Thus, they build the stories first, since stories always work out no matter the time, then build the game on the story when the new hardware comes.
Between projects, engineers could be working on improving the tools used to create the game. There are always user experience and productivity design problems that can be tackled in the level editors when the production team isn't hounding the programmers for specific features that needed to be shipped "last week."
So, basically pipelining?
You essentially have two or three games being worked on with offsets in production. One game in pre-production, one in the first year of production, and one in the second year of production, due for release at the end of the year.
Year 1, you have Team A working on the second year of Game X's 2-year production, Team B working on Game Y's first year of production (out of 2 years total), and the tiny Team C doing pre-production on Game Z.
Year 2, Game X has shipped, Team C merges with Team A to start work on Game Z. Team B moves into year 2 of production on Game Y. Team D is created to start pre-production on Game A.
PRE-PRO-DUC-TION!! PREPRODUCTION!! Put your planning skills to work...
2K (of Borderlands fame), has a single staff working on two projects at any given time. The two projects are in asynchronous levels of completion intentionally. The early part of a game requires less staff, the middle requires the most, and the end requires slightly less than the middle (for well managed projects). So one project has a ton to do while the other has less to do and vise versa. Plus, having creatives alternate between projects, they don't get tired as easily.
When do you stop planing and start building?
What happens if that one in the chamber miss fires and gets ejected too late causing the it to act as a blank.Then they have nothing waiting for them if they do it from shot to the next.
The name of the outro music is "Sweet Georgia Brown", not "Gypsy Jazz":
Wikipedia article: en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sweet_Georgia_Brown
Example on UA-cam: ua-cam.com/video/JkxrCttCcHg/v-deo.html
"Talk to us about it, we'll tell you differently" - Valve
(cont.) Skyrim uses top notch gameplay with modern stuff. If you think about it, since they already have some quests down and the main stuff, but not too much on gameplay, this might mean they're coming to a close on TES Online, and maybe doing Elder Scrolls 6, or a new Fallout even. This is just an amazing thought, knowing these guys are doing so well because they're doing what this guy here said!
You could partially solve the issue of productivity by giving them deadlines (this chaerecter needs to be planned out by next week), and you could stop the problem of having to take people off at the end by putting those people on pre production first, then have them move back to the current project if there's time
How have I not considered this before?
for film you have a entire guild just for story lines which is what i gather is the " pre-production " which you are referring to so cant games just get together a guild of people to make story lines and content for them also?
I've heard another version of that song somewhere and it's driving me crazy. Does any one know where it's from?
+1aldaris I have since looked in the description.
Silly me.
What's tragic is that Pixar is now changing their pipeline. Now that they are under new management, instead of having 2 or 3 films in the pipeline, they now have 7-9. This is very unfortunate exactly because of what this video talks about: it cuts short time to develop the story. The movie Brave is a result of this. It wasn't a story of Pixar quality, even though it was visually impressive. It' sad to see this happening. It really is.
You could always divide up your non-core team into little game-jam projects if there's pre-production downtime. At worst, you end up with some assets and engine tweaks you can drag out later, at best, you get an exciting prototype for your next project. Hell, maybe you might get a few cool $5 iPhone/XBLA/PSN games out of it.
might this be while updates to older projects are seen more recently? the programmers that can't be useful in PRE can work on the older project for good PR and happier players, as well as a selling point.
What if you just had 2 teams? One small team solely focuses on pre-production work and the second team is the game developer team. That way no one from the game development team is being taken off of a project. Also, if you have a team that only does pre-production, they should eventually become efficient and complete pre-production faster. Once they've finished pre-production, they can start planning on another game, regardless if the first team is done with the current project.
Awesome!!!!
It seems like the problem of no deadline could be solved by simply giving the team on preproduction until the team on active development finishes to have a rough idea to for production. I don't know, but it seems like the time in production of the other game plus maybe the time spent bringing the programmers up to speed would be plenty for preproduction.
Looked at those figures at 2:35. Gave me another good reason to become a programmer.
We the video game enthusiasts or people who enjoy interactive entertainment as a hobby could do our small part by simply sharing (social media would be a good start) or spreading word of mouth about this intelligent critical analysis about the science, business, art, and culture of video games.
2012: I can't wait to be the next Blizzard!
2021: ...no comment.
Even worse than pre-production getting cut short, pre-production running into a project...? Where things are constantly changing (work scrapped or redone), there's an air of uncertainty for direction, project management/deadlines are more arbitrary than tossing darts at a calendar so are pushed constantly, etc...
damn, no wonder we have been suddenly getting sequels to their films recently.
Was waiting for you to bring up Pixar but when you did it was not in the way I was expecting, so I'm just going to throw out something Walt Disney would have his teams do before they start a major project. Creating shorts.
This practice seems to have been revitalised in recent years by Pixar who always put their short before a movie and in games I've seen it done by Quantic Dream and Double Fine.
The point being that it allows teams some room to flex their creative muscles and practice their skills, without having to pour millions into a project. (Google "The Goddess of Spring")
As everyone knows Pixar put their shorts in front of movies to add to the cinema goers experience and they generally work in warming up an audience before a movie. They can also be a testing ground for new ideas to see how consumers respond. Recently Disney announced that they were going to make a feature length film based off the animation techniques of their short Paperman. Which won them an Academy Award but didn't make any money.
So, for games, take a project (anything) and give it to all those people not doing anything during the pre-production phase (a month?) and then release it. The studio could put it on the disc of the feature game as a cool extra or it could put it in some download store for a dollar. It's a much cooler way of collecting metrics and it leaves your team stronger when it's finished. Of course it could also make a profit but that's not even the priority. Just breaking even means that that first month of pre-production was totally free.
That's all I wanted to say but here are examples; Portal began as a mod; Spacebase DF9 (now in early access) was released as a prototype; Heavy Rain the tech demo existed before Heavy Rain the game; Geometry Wars was for a long time only available as a mini game on Project Gotham 2 because the studio didn't feel justified in releasing it as a full retail game; and Ape Escape 2 had a mini game called Monkey Football which I have invested more time in as a party game than anything the main game had to offer.
Sadly this is true, due to that fact friends and I are trying to work on a game, and ever since the deadline was removed, our team has been trapped in pre-production... It's gotten so bad that a lot of our staff has decided to quit and pursue other projects.
You know what's cool? James (the "mastermind," although Daniel writes the scripts with him) *has* taken the initiative in taking these messages out to the gaming industry.