Over this summer and the coming year, Erin Reynolds and I will be devising and producing two modern-console-bound games in about 16 weeks each. The summer’s brainstorming and pitching phase nearly concluded, it falls to us to both select volunteers (as we have basically no budget) and to design a production process and schedule capable of achieving our ludic goals within such compressed timeframes. The actual selection process is ongoing and thus it would be gauche to speak of it, but I thought it might be valuable (for me, at least, if no one else) to write a series of articles about our current and prospective production processes. First, then, a post on why we want to manage anyone at all when theoretically we could do all of the work ourselves.

Erin and I are specialists. She is an accomplished artist and I am a coder with a healthy loathing for his past work (which ought at least to be a sign of progress). Erin also has a lot of experience with the production side of game development: ensuring that work is accomplished in a timely manner. Our primary goal here—that is, apart from the creation of excellent entertainments—is personal skill development. Specifically, we would like to branch out from our specialties and avoid the so-comfortable (yet so-stagnant) pigeonholes that we often fall into. We therefore each intend, if at all possible, to supervise two volunteer “employees”—and I have taken on the responsibility of producing these games and managing the work effort on all fronts.

Obviously, neither of us wants to abandon our core competencies or leave the hard work to others. While I hope to avoid being bogged down in day-to-day bug-fixing, I fully intend to work extensively on digital prototypes, support tools, and other facilitative software in addition to my core design and production tasks. Similarly, Erin wants to evade the artist’s purgatory of endless animation tweaks and will instead provide concept art, character bibles, reference materials, and art direction alongside her design work. We will both take responsibility for exhaustive quality assurance and bug reporting.

Future posts will detail how we have brainstormed and developed our pitches, how we have estimated and scheduled our work, and how we intend to run our production: how many meetings, how many sticky notes, and where the big whiteboard should go.