Sometimes you wonder what you do all day. You didn’t have any coffee breaks. You didn’t google away any time at all. There weren’t any scheduled meetings. But still, after nine hours there’s not much to show for your efforts. It’s frustrating and it can make you have serious doubts regarding your own abilitites. This is something that, in a good scenario, pushes you a little bit harder and keeps you on edge. Trying harder, focusing even more. In the worst case scenario it gives you a stomach ulcer and sends you home, promising yourself to look for another job. Any job.
Then you write about it, talk about it, think about it and the pressure wears off and you forget what those negative doubtful thoughts really were about, anyway? You remember why you wanted to do this and you know you’re really going to enjoy going to work on Monday.
I’ve come to understand that this is part of the project management issues that you simply have to learn to live with - and might even come to enjoy. This is where communication might prove to be the best medicin - talk to your team and learn what is actually going on. Talking to people is somewhat underestimated as an antidote of last minute pre-launch panic attacks. Problems exist, stuff happen and deadlines break. That’s not gonna change. But if you keep talking to people you’re gonna know about it in time to reduce the damage.
Even though the development sometimes go into that invisible mode, where noone outside the team can actually see something is happening, things ARE as a matter of fact evolving. Constantly. It’s part of the dilemma of game development that from time to time, when the board and other people who are interested in seeing some progress, they just have to take your word for it. “Yes, it’s going well. We’re working as hard as we can. But no, there’s no actual visible difference…yet”. Some developers solve this by always having a playable demo for the publishers and others to see or play. Others make sure that everybody who’s working on the game commit their work before they go home and the latest version of the game is always working. Always. Some even have an alarm going off (Yes, really. On evereones desk!) when something that’s not working is being comitted.
I’m lucky enough to have a team with really brilliant people. They’re smart and nice and funny and thanks to them my job feels great most of the time. And when it doesn’t - they’re never to blame. Basically, I trust them. They’re gonna come in to the office with some new clever solutions and cool ideas and build incredible stuff. I don’t take them for granted although it’s their job to do all this - how could I? Without them there are no games.
And talking about building cool stuff - on Friday Per E and Erik made the pool server work! Go Thunderbirds! It’s one of those breakthroughs that really deserves an evening of celebreation. That pool server is kind of the foundation of our future official multiplayer game modes. This major success gave them each a green marzipan frog and of course the satisfaction of knowing that we, thanks to that, kept our informal internal not much spoken of deadline.
And that pretty much sums it up. They do their magic and I try to provide them with what they need to do so, looking down on it all from some macro bird view perspective where, on a good day, it’s all very clear and you can see for miles. At other times the details are hunting you and the slices and sprints and planning poker complexity points makes you wanna run and hide.
Today I’m gonna have lunch with Michael (my fellow producer here at PC) to discuss “What is fun, really?” (in games, ours and others). Interesting, necessary - and fun!
// back to the coal mine drinking tea from my bright red “Seriously” Grey’s Anatomy-cup.
