Learning to do many things at once

A friend of mine who visited the site commented that I should perhaps update my blog, as I had not written since January.

I have been waiting to write a plan until I had something major to announce, but as many of the projects that I am working on are related to external developers with whom we have signed NDAs, there is not much that I can say.

On these projects, however, I have been acting as Producer. A bit of a change from my normal artist role. I can say that I finally feel Jay's pain when he says that he spent an entire day doing nothing but email and phone calls. It is amazing how much time can be eaten up by communication when one is working on an externally contracted project.

I think that many indies may be unaware of what they are getting themselves into when they take on contract work, or first attempt to publish through a major channel. I know it has been said before both at IGC and throughout the forums - but having at least one full time marketing or business relations person can be a very good thing! Having your artists and programmers dealing directly with external communications can really put a damper on productivity - it can be very hard to have to constantly switch gears to take on both tasks simultaneously.

I know my art productivity has dropped significantly as a result of working as producer - fortunately I have a great team of pro artists here at GG who are also working on these projects. We can afford the time lost to business communication. In a small team, I imagine that having one of the main creative or technical minds spending all their time on external relations could really slow down the entire development process.

Being a producer has also introduced me to complexities of scheduling and external contracting of which I was previously unaware. When you are on a tightly scheduled project, it is very important to prioritize tasks and to learn how long it takes you and your team members to complete a task. Communication is also key at this stage, as a single person falling behind can impact the scheduling of the entire project.

Often small projects need to contract out some of their artwork or code to get done on time, or to achieve a style or level of concept polish that the internal team cannot reach. Communication is even more important here - making sure that the person you are contracting knows what you are expecting and when. This means talking to them on the phone or in person and laying out (in detail) what needs to be done - in the case of artwork it may also involve showing them your own rougher sketches of the design that you want them to flesh out. To avoid any hard feelings, make sure that your contract reflects what qualifies as acceptable work, and for it to have a clause for compensating the contractor for their time if what they submit is not on par with what you expected.

As a final note, I would just like to reiterate just what a great lifestyle the indie development cycle is - while working on some of these large, externally contracted and scheduled projects, I think many of us here at GG have gotten a bit of a taste of the level of stress and crunch time created by the schedules of a normal development house. While doing games on an external contract might be a great source of income and experience, the real ideal is to develop games that you want to play on your own schedule.

I apologize for the lack of pictures (I didn't really have anything to fit the subjects matter). As an amusement to those who made it this far without any visual stimulation, I present: Teen Angst Mouse!