How to be a good game producer for a genre/discipline you don’t know

Often I hear that to be a good manager or producer you need to have done that discipline yourself. And yeah, it can be helpful, but counter-intuitively, I actually think that not knowing a discipline can be an amazing super power in conversations with team members.

Part of production is about listening to team members and creating processes that allow them to do their best work. If you already know a specific discipline back to front, then your tendency will be to just dictate processes that worked for you when you were doing that discipline. But that process might not actually work for another person or team or for this game.

When you don’t know that much about a discipline, you need to start all your conversations from scratch and that can help you avoid biases that you didn’t even know you had. Also, many people love to feel smart by telling you all about how they do what they do.

Talk to People

So start with talking. But who are you talking to and what are you asking?

• Begin with people in the discipline that you want to learn about.
  • Ask them to talk through their process. How do you create content/assets/do your work?
    • Be Jennuinely curious.
    • Show humility and a willingness to learn.
  • Ask them what tools they need
  • Ask about dependencies, timelines, preferred deliverables.
  • Find out about how it will get tested and/or reviewed
  • Ask about risks and things that didn’t work on other games.
• Reach out to friends outside this team who have worked with this discipline before. Find out what processes have worked for them.
• Talk to other disciplines in your team about what they need from this discipline.

Vertical vs Horizontal Game Development

Next look at if you need to change the fundamental way you make this game. Look at how you would approached development phases on your previous games and consider what assumptions you’ve made. Consider if those assumptions will still be valid.

I find it helpful to talk about two key different ways of developing games: vertical vs horizontal.

• In vertical development: you develop a single level or feature to an almost shippable degree of done. Then you move to the next level of feature and get that to a similar level and so on until everything is almost done. Then you polish.

• In horizontal development: you do a little in every level or for every feature. Then you iterate over everything slowly pushing everything up in waves until everything is fully done or ready for shipping.

• Most of the time these terms apply to levels that you’re working on. But for some games it makes more sense to talk about the features being developed vertically or horizontally.
• Sometimes you don’t get a choice because of publisher, marketing or other needs.
• In general, vertical development of levels works well when you’re working in a genre you don’t know and you’re not sure how features will combine together. It can often be for genres that are very gameplay focused.
• Horizontal development of levels works well when you know the genre well and are building new content to fit on top of well-known features. That’s because at some very early point you can play through the entire game and see how it’s coming together and then chuck out or add new levels without throwing out completed work.
• For narrative focused games that are leaning on established gameplay norms, horizontal development can allow the team to feel how big picture story pacing is going very early on in development.

I don’t think many other teams use those terms in that way, but I find them helpful for talking to the team to understand how they want to make the game in a broad sense. And of course, you can use hybrid versions where you start with vertical for a single level and then do horizontal for the rest of development.

So there you have it. The basics are: talk to your discipline specialists, talk to other disciplines, talk to people outside your company, and consider the broad strokes of how to develop your game.

Remember: This is general advice and it might not be right for you and your team, even if you’re the one who wrote in the question! For me to help better, it needs to be a dialog between me, and you, and your entire team. You can hire me to consult for you —> jennsand.com