Issue Two: Featured area—Production
- Being a Producer, By POB
- Gareth
- Chad
- Bev
- POB
- Nick
- The Boy
- Gaff
- Ian
- Lisa
Being a Producer, By POB
This isn't my first shot at it. I was invited into Bizarre after several hours of interviews by way of a handshake and annual wage.
The role of producer within the industry is atypical. In a broad sense responsibilities as a Bizarre Creations Producer are defined under three very sombre sounding areas; Time Management, Team Management, and Process Management.
All areas require various tools. These are schedules, task lists, reminders, meetings, guile, decision making ability, and the most important of all: one-on-one communication. Communication is fundamental to the success of any project and key to successful production. The outcome of strong communication will be a vivid and coherent schedule that reflects all (or most) the individual tasks across each team discipline which are required to make the game, and [a schedule] that everyone knows about.
To apply any of the above we have to make sure we hire the best people and the right people. Every company has their own culture and it’s important to us that we strengthen and maintain what is Bizarre's.
Working with internal teams aside, we also have to work with publishers and outsourcing companies. Outsourcing companies simply need to understand the flow and spec of the work but the publisher is a different beast.
The most important parts of the publisher relationship is trust (aside from the obvious: cash!) and process. Making things run smoothly will involve keeping publishers in the loop through management methods, working with them, utilizing resources to help make the game, and finally (and most importantly), taking them out to experience the Liverpool nightlife when they come to visit. It’s not an exaggeration to state the relationship is one of the chicken and the egg.
That's the broad stroke of what I and the other producers at Bizarre do. The fact remains we all produce with a varying degree of emphasis on specific development areas. I for one am a strong advocate of design, visual and technical, supported by a strong production environment comprising of focused concept, pre-production, production, and post-production periods of development. Saving the most obvious but most important fact until last is that we are ultimately responsible for getting the game out of development and into manufacture on and time to design spec—no easy feat!
But aside from the sombre sounding stuff above, there’s a lot of people-related things in there that we do at Bizarre which maybe don’t get done at other places. The Production Team has to make sure that they go those extra miles to make sure everyone’s happy in what they do, as well as organized in what they do.
So, for example, we’ve been known to take people home, take them to the laundrette to get their washing done and even put them up for a while to help them out during busy periods. We cook breakfast and dinner meals for team members working past normal hours, although our new ‘chef’ will be a great asset in helping there. Cups of tea for team members have been known to be made—but this is usually the reserve of visiting external producers if we can grab them!
So that’s it, being a producer in a very big nutshell!
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Developer Diary Entries
OK – so, the first real entry! What's been happening? Myself and The Boy returned from E3 last week—it was a fantastic show with three new consoles unveiled, the next generation is here! (Well, nearly.)
We were impressed with the number of Xbox 360™ titles announced. Every publisher seemed to have plans for games at launch or a few months after. It’s also cool to get to see what other developers are getting up to.
We also got a (sneaky) VIP pass to the Xbox 360 launch party, with The Killers and The Chemical Brothers playing, and free booze. Yay! Other highlights included:
- The Boy met the creator of Ultima Online and nearly wet himself
- We met Fatal1ty, the world Quake 3 and Counter Strike champion who was a bit bemuzed by the legion of geeks wanting his autograph
- We saw a really small Gameboy Advance that looked great
- There were cut scenes and models and stuff from the Chronicles of Narnia film that's due to come out this year. The film looks like it will be ace, all the CGI is by Weta Workshop.
- Evil Kenevil has a game out and was there signing autographs, although he looked so knackered I wasn't sure he'd get to the end of the queue
On the game side we've been polishing the UI this week and also doing the final pass of the car tuning. With the cars, it’s a delicate balancing act to get the cars to feel different based on their engine setup, drive train, weight etc., but are still good and realistic to drive. You really would not believe how many things can be tweaked in the physics engine! But this level of detail allows us to have cars that the pros can do cool stuff in but still be driveable by newbies. Achieving this has not been helped by my computer blowing up today, which means I'm typing this on the slow-as-Hell company shared laptop…
But that's technology progress for you.
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Wahey! We’re finally announced! For the past year I’ve been lying to my friends – when asked what game I’m working on, I’ve had to give a stern “I cannot comment on that”, whilst winking and whispering, “I didn’t tell you, but the working title is Barbie Goes Postal”. Well, the silence has been broken, and having two great websites to point my mates at, I can feel smug at their jealousy – “Yes! I work on PGR 3, mwuhahahahaha! You may now bow before me!”
On a non-work related issue, I saw Episode 3 the other day – fantastic! I rather foolishly booked tickets for 13 of us the evening of the European Championship final, but, still, Football or Jedis? Need you ask?
Well, things have been going smoothly back at camp, us programmer types are salivating over the latest hardware from MS. Working with the best in next generation hardware truly allows us to push the boundaries, making possible some really jaw-dropping stuff that was previously only available to us in our dreams -- on the rare occasions we actually get any sleep.
We’ve had a few new additions over the past couple of weeks, including three full-time testers, who will no doubt be bugging me with lots of, er, bugs to fix. My brother has also started working at Bizarre and sits across the desk from me, so I’m looking forward to bossing him around too. But I have to say I’m most excited about the other new addition, Graeme, parts of whose job will be cooking breakfast for the early risers and dinner for those us who will be sleeping at our desks. Now, being someone who loves eating with a passion, I count this as ‘a good thing’.
It’s been fantastic to watch the game really come together in the past few months -seeing the MTV feature and, most recently, a preview in a Japanese games magazine. I can safely say that I’m very excited about PGR 3—both for us developers and you gamers! One of the areas I’ve been looking at recently is the damage on the cars. I feel bad sometimes, when I see such a painstakingly and beautifully modelled car smash into a barrier at 100 m.p.h., thinking of the time spent in front of a computer creating beautiful curves and intricate details, only for me to come along and destroy it all… But then I see the sparks fly, and hear the sickening crunch of tens of thousands of pounds worth of super car contorting under the impact … and I remember how much I love those breaky noises.
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Questions, questions… Some of the ones that have come up over the last couple of weeks:
- Can you come outside and scream for five minutes please? Erm, ok…
- Which of these almost identical pictures of tarmac looks the most realistic? Er, that one?
- Why isn’t the barrier tool working on my computer? One of life’s great mysteries, rarely the same answer for any two people. No one has yet been denied the joy of Armco though.
- How are the materials going? (Materials: various greyscale images which define concrete, glass, metal, etc.) Well, I’ve made several thousands but… must… keep… going… whimper…
- What game are you working on? Finally allowed to answer that one!
But there comes a point in the development cycle when the most important question of all is raised: “What’s for dinner?” Back in the bad old days, crunch time meant three months of living on pizza and, inevitably, after a short period of time, looking like one. Recently we’ve become conversant with the entire range of TV dinners available from the local supermarkets – all ready meals are not created equal. But, joy of joys, we now have a Graeme and the prospect of home-cooked chilli, casseroles, and err... pizzas…
Of course the big news (aside from PGR3 of course) was our victory in the football. Bizarre Creations beat EA Warrington 7-2!
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The team has worked very hard to bring you guys the goods with a video and a few shots for the E3 show; I trust we pushed all the right buttons?
With baptism on MTV does this mean we are 'cool'? Hmm, maybe when games have a TRL-a-like show? Or, was ‘cool’ the late 90's when we were hearing stories about conquering worlds?
At the office:
- The eyes of the team can now be used to tell their age due to dark rings; unless an ‘80s revival happened while I was in bed?
- Fridays are becoming irrelevant, weeks will soon follow (day/night have been omitted for sometime).
- My portrait had to be censored by MS, even though they loved it, and had to replace it with the existing one. We will reveal it on our own site soon.
- Everyone's back from E3 with stories of parties, women, and the US... oh, and games.
Out of the office:
- Liverpool are European Champions for the 5th time … amazing scenes in the Liverpool!
- MUFC will soon adopt the US style (unconfirmed at time of writing - there is a history of rivalry in the north west of England between the city of Manchester and Liverpool which is expressed through football).
- The sun shines...
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There is nothing much to report on the audio front this time. One member of the team went home to Germany to watch the Grand Prix, and nothing else exciting happened.
We are looking forward to the weekend as we are going to smash up some car parts with a big hammer.
This week I have been mostly listening to … turbocharged six cylinder engines.
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We have returned! Gareth and I are back from sunny L.A. with a whole host of stories from E3 that I hope never make their way onto the web, mostly involving alcohol funnily enough…
As online is my area to report on I suppose I should give a little more info on what we’re doing to make PGR 3 the ultimate online racing experience. The best place to start? GothamTV. GothamTV is real, it’s big, and the entire game is wet-wired into it. Imagine this scenario:
You and your friends go online for some head to head action. Jumping into your McLarens, Lambos, and Ferraris you pick a New York track and start the race. At this point GothamTV pops up.
It informs you that this race, right now, is being broadcast. Live. To the world.
Now, every player in the game and online sees your names along the news ticker telling them about the race, with a quick link to take them straight to the action. No longer is this just any old online race, now it’s a televised online race being watched by thousands of players around the world as the action happens.
GothamTV is much more than this one small example – we’ve not touched on the Heroes, Hall of Fame, or Archives yet. Through all this our main goal is to bring your race into the arena of real sport. We want you to make a name for yourself, have your own fans, and create real rivalries with thousands of other players taking to the stands and watching your progress. We want real Gotham heroes and recognized world champions.
But enough of that. I’ll leave the detail to the full announcement when it’s ready, after all, while GothamTV is important, we still haven’t mentioned any of the new race modes, ranking systems, or career championships. In the meantime, prepare yourselves for an online experience never before attempted!
(See, I did a whole post-E3 update without mentioning any of my hundreds of photos of booth babes!)
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The past couple of weeks have started to get very busy because we’re heading into the horrific crunch period at the end of the project. You’d think this wouldn’t affect Team IT too much considering we are not directly involved in development, but the crunch period is typified by already over stressed individuals being extra stressed by infuriating technology. Regular occurrences during this time:
- Visits from bleary eyed, dishevelled, unshaven programmers with red faces nearly crying because their machines are taking 30 seconds longer to compile than their neighbours.
- Computers breaking at the most inopportune moments (“AAAARgh! My hard drive has died and we had to send this build off 2 HOURS AGO!”).
- The inevitable server failure 2 days before a major milestone.
- Having to put more memory in artist’s machines because they’ve just loaded up all their xref’s into the main scene and their 3d package keeps crashing.
Needless to say it can be a difficult time because the tiniest thing can tip someone over the edge. It’s the IT department’s job to calm the individual down and get them up and running again as quickly as possible while trying to remain less stressed than everyone else. Just reading that back it doesn’t sound like much fun, but to be honest this is the part of the project I most look forward to. I must be some kind of masochist.
To counteract this, we try to keep ourselves amused. Things that have amused Team IT this week:
- I’m a Liverpool fan, and Andy is a ManU fan. In case you haven’t heard, Liverpool won the European Cup for the fifth time last week, and Andy was so annoyed when Dudek made that incredible double save from Shevchenko in the last minute of extra time he punched his TV and broke it. Ha. I’ve been lording it over him ever since.
- Andy related an amusing conversation he had with his hairdresser about the implications of self replicating robots on the hairdressing industry – robots don’t need hair, so why would they need hairdressers? This is an element of the human/robot co-existence quandary that had not been considered previously, and maybe other workers outside the beauty industry should consider whether the robot overlords will need their services once they have control… There was a very long discussion about this.
That is all for now.
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Drip. Drip. Drip. Drip. Drip.
(No, Ian’s not a drip, but this is what he’s experiencing this week as he chose to take a holiday in the UK, with its lovely weather!)
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Well where do I start...? I have had the mouth month from Hell! Not only have I had teeth out but the evil people at the dentist gave me a brace! I will not find ‘brace face’ ‘jaws’ or other such meanness funny.
Forget about me and my complaints, let’s talk about Bizarre! Last week was fantastic, the sun was shining and Bizarre was, well, bizarre.
One of my main roles at Bizarre is to look after all the guys and gals and keep them fed and watered and make sure we are always in stocks of sweets and sweets. Most people work late or at weekends, which means I have to make sure there is always food. This means I’m forever out to the local supermarkets and keeping them in business by emptying their shelves (should really check out their shares). I could shop forever but I know its time to stop when I notice the trolley is overflowing.
The other problem is trying to fit it in our all American-style huge fridge – most of the time it doesn't fit! But, guaranteed the following morning it will be empty again so the shopping begins all over again. This usually means the guys and gals at Bizarre have yet again been working hard until all hours of the night trying to meet deadlines – either that or their own cupboards at home are bare.
The mess of the kitchen afterwards is not a pretty sight. And ‘mummy’ here gets to clean all the crusty germs away with plenty of Dettol. Pity I can’t use it on some of the grubby boys here!
This week I have been doing inductions for the company car. If you could see some on the photos on the driving licences you would laugh your socks off! If you think Chad's picture is bad, his driving licence is far worse! One of our guys stalled the company car, and it's an automatic, which I didn't know was possible! The Company car is mainly used for research trips, but as we’re such nice people it often gets borrowed to move houses, take the footy team to play, and other things.
I could go on forever but the phones are ringing and there is a strange man at reception I have to interrogate.
Speak to you all very soon.
P.S. If you really want to know more about what I look like, then buy PGR 3 as I’ll be there waving at you from the crowd!
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