What do producers do to sharpen their skills? Being tired is obviously a factor and it can affect performance and how quickly things are managed, so that's a given that a good night's sleep can increase your capacity to handle things. However in terms of other things outside of work what sorts of activities can you do to improve your skills for "production?" Are there exercises in a software program that you can use as a resource or an extracurricular group of other producers you're a part of? Books you read to garner inspiration?asked by Zero Lambda

Yes. Great question.

Okay I feel bad now. Because actually this is a fantastic question. I read this question on the forums this morning when we were picking our questions. And I was like, "Wow that's a great question, I should just answer that." And I wrote him an answer in the forums.

So go to the forums. Next question.

No, no, no. Honestly we should answer. Because it was a really good one.

You already posted about it, you had some prep time. There is a lot of things you can do. There's a lot of different aspects to being a producer. And so there's a lot of different skills you can learn in different places to get ready for this kind of role. Books are great like you just talked about drive. One of my favorite kind of leadership books is "First, Break All The Rules." It's fantastic. And then they have a strength one after it. And then there's the Game Developer's Handbook and there's a production book out there, there's a team leadership for the game development written by Seth Spaulding that I loved. It was just kind of overview picture of small studios. THough there's a ton of really cool books out there from very talented...

Dale Carnegie's "How to Win Friends and Influence People."

Yup, that's a fantastic one. Cause I think what's cool about this job or strange. Is that we have so many elements we can learn from so many different things, right? So being a manger at your local convenience store is still helpful for becoming a producer, right? Leading people, managing a process, being responsible, being held accountable for things. That's very important. There are tons of people out there making games all over the place with the amount of SDKs out there and the amount of opportunities nowadays. Not just including the schools that are popping up everywhere. But there's tons of cool game - I can't think of some of the websites. But there's some websites you just google, "Looking for writer, looking for producer, looking for developer." Jump in on one of those and say, "Hey I'll be your producer for it. I don't know what that means, but how can I help?" And then try to start forming a team, and then help that team achieve one thing. Even if it's just your first sprint. Use different types of project management, scrum, agile, waterfall, the PNP program that talks about the whole large project management process. It's really cool. So there's tons of really great schooling and there's tons of different things you can focus on to be good at this job. Playing games is awesome, but that's not the only part of this job. In fact you need to love making games or making entertainment as much or more than you love playing them, to I think do this job.

Yeah, no there's a lot of... Like Eric has covered there's a lot of great project management training, resources, reading. There's a lot of great books on psychology and people management and dealing with people. A large part of your job is dealing with communication and individuals. You can also - another great tactic, and I've done this myself, which is learn each of the pieces of software of the team that you're dealing with. So you can actually speak to them and talk to them and understand when they describe a problem to you, what that problem means, how long it's going to take. I mean there's other things that you can't do unless you've been in the industry. But it's like, you know, a good characteristic, always stay self aware. It's kind of horrible but I'll probably spend a lot of my time at night or you know kind of "bathroom time" or whatever; thinking about past decisions I've made, past things I said, how I handled this interaction, and replaying it in my mind over and over. What if I did it this way? What if I did it this way? And trying to absorb some new outcome. And it's kind of like running a permanent retrospective on your life I guess. What did I mess up, what do we do okay but could be better, and what did we do well? Other things like, E3 is great we're going to go to E3 a little later today. E3, GDC, seeing old coworkers is like developing a network of mentors, respected coworkers, even if you've never worked with them before you could have people that you respect and have a relationship with. A lot of times when I have a big problem or a big question I need answering, I kind of go to what I call my Small Council, you know what I mean? I try to bounce it off as many people as possible and come to consensus of opinion.

Yeah. To speak about the software thing. So to give some examples, right? Like 3ds Max, and Maya are used a lot. For production tracking: JIRA. Getting a handle on JIRA, Shotgun software, any kind of production tracking software. Microsoft Project I've seen used at a lot of companies as well.

Project Hansoft. And you can get free trials of all this stuff.

You totally can. What other programs can people get their hands dirty with?

Visual Studio. Actually I think, if I am not mistaken, I think they're going to make Visual Studio free.

Hey, get it.

I think that was an announcement recently. I can't remember exactly. But yeah visual studio. I mean learning, seriously just the basics of programming. Like there are so many tutorials out there that will teach you about what's a virtual function, what's a pointer, how do these things work, how do they interact, how to setup a program. You know and you might do something stupid like me and just make a little MS DOS calculator. But you know it gives you a little bit of a foundation that you can build from.

Yeah, and I think understanding a little bit about what team - you know because being just a generic producer that helps everyone is fantastic. But you'll see as we talked about earlier with different skill sets. There might be a certain thing you have a passion about in kind of the back of your head. So I am a big fan of art, I did a lot of art growing up, I have a BFA. And so I like working around artists and helping encourage them to do a great job. Doesn't mean I don't want to work with everybody, the designers and the programmers. But that's kind of my thing that I know the most about. So I would like to help them. The more you know the better it is - to go back to another question we talked about earlier, was understanding bids and how much time people take. The more you understand about what job they're doing, not in depth but just a base knowledge. The better it is when they say, "That will take me four days." You can kind of go, "Well that seems like... normally it has only taken us two, because I know what software you're using, I know how it takes generally to make that piece of art. Because I've seen somebody else do it." It just helps fuel that producer inside you.

Yeah.

So great question. I hope that answered it. That was a lot of questions, I hope we got them all.

Yeah, yeah.

And if you have other questions always feel free to reach out to us. We love answering questions.

Absolutely. we'll answer you on the forums.

That's right, that's right.

[laughing]

I hope that lined up with what you said on the forum.