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It's more than just enforcing deadlines and keeping everybody on track. What is your day-to-day like here at Star Citizen?

TL;DRThe day-to-day varies by project, but involves turning ideas into features, coordinating designers, programmers, artists and testers, managing art pipelines and technical challenges, so the result still resembles the original idea.

Dennis CrowSenior Producer

Again, the producer does what you've got to do, right? And every project's different. So if you've got a project where you need to create a certain level, let's say that you wanted to create a level of a game, you need to have a lot of people do their work and then bring it together for a project. So you're starting with an idea or with a concept or something that people want, and you sit in a room, get up on the whiteboard, and "wouldn't it be cool if", and you've also been up on the board. And then there's a whole bunch of work that needs to get done to make that "wouldn't it be cool if" happen. You've got to have features written on that, right? So you've got to figure out, okay, wouldn't it be cool if this happened? What are all the features we need to drive that? Okay, so these features are going to have to be given to designers and programmers and artists and QA testers to be able to work together and get out, right? So that's one thing you've got to do, is shepherd it through that process while still keeping the soul and figuring out implementation as you go along. But you may also need to create cinematics or art or a character or a ship. And that's not really feature development. That's almost like an assembly line. That's almost like a group of people who know about an art pipeline and can manage that. So that takes a different skill to get through there, because you're talking to different people and dealing with different issues there. So then you also have this thing in a game, which makes it so much fun, which is you've got the technical side. Yeah, we're art. Yeah, we're design, but we're also technical. So we've also got to figure out technical solutions in terms of the code and the graphics and the performance and the optimizations, all of these things. And those are purely engineering challenges and tooling challenges. So a producer who just goes around and just checks off the list, maybe sometimes the list needs to be checked off, but in reality, they're taking that "wouldn't it be cool if", and then saying, okay, in order to make this happen, what do we need to get done? How do we coordinate all these people together? So at the end, when everyone's delivering it together, it has some resemblance to what that whiteboard said that many months ago. Some resemblance.

Reverse the Verse›LIVE - Production and the RSI Roadmap·
Published on this date.2 Mar 2018