What's your philosophy for keeping devs on task that might have many dependencies in an agile environment? Would you describe CIG's process as pure agile or some sort of hybrid?

Who wants to be a producer? That's a question I would have asked before I was in this industry. Well, first of all, there's a difference between philosophy and what's actually happening in practice, right? You can have philosophies all day. Production is very good at pontification. We can talk, because that's part of our job. But generally, I judge someone based on their philosophy, because that's what they'll do in emergency or chaos situations sometimes. So what is CIG's production process? It depends on the pipeline, honestly. We can't have one specific way to do everything, because that's not how what we do works, or really anything works when it comes to creative projects. I've never worked on a project at any company where I had one way that worked for everybody all the time. That's not how this works. So some teams are really hardcore agile, right? It really works well for them, because two-week sprints are great. Software development, two-week sprints are fantastic. Art assets, that's not necessarily the best way to do agile.

I think the perfect example would be, take either the ship pipeline or, even better example, the character tasking pipeline. And then take a graphics engineer's task. So a graphics engineer is much more agile. You literally have a list of things that need to get completed and then you queue them up in order, which is an absolute agile production method. And then you have the other route, which is more art tasks, which is more pipeline and disciplines, right? So you have your upstream dependency and your downstream dependency, and you start with your concept, and then you have your design guide, and then you have your concept, and then you have the high-res sculpt, and then you have the game topology, and then you have your texturing, and then it goes off to your animation, and then it starts branching, and you start having this tree of parallel dependencies, and it gets a little more complicated. So I think you're right, it really depends on the discipline that you're talking about.

And in all of our pipelines, the discovery process is very important. What we're doing across the board in certain areas is unique. Some of it's not, but most of it's very unique. Discovering things is very hard to schedule and plan and organize. You do plan for it. It's called adding time, because you know it's going to happen. But when you're doing something unique, we're not making houses, we're not manufacturing trailers, we're making something creative. So we have a lot of creative people. Creative people have great ideas, and sometimes their other ideas are better than their current ideas. So understanding which one's the best idea to use at the time, which one you take and put in the backlog, which one you act on to get out the first version, right? There's all kinds of factors that go into planning, organizing, scheduling. For me, I think working alongside your leads, working alongside your directors is absolutely key. Production, our job is to somewhat stay partially outside of the actual details, because then we can look at it objectively; if we get too far in, we can't. But at the same time, we need to have some basic level of knowledge, right? I always think a good producer did the work before, generally, either in their degree or their background. Pure business guys or girls are cool, and they have something to offer as well, but I've found that they have more challenges unless they've actually done it themselves. Even if it's a school project, or you do a mod outside of work, it helps to have that level of knowledge. You can't know everything all the time, so you have to rely on your team, and there has to be a level of trust between your folks. So back to your question, what is my production philosophy? I'm hoping these guys could probably answer at this point what my philosophy is, but the perfect project management triangle, of course, I talk about this quite a lot, the health of your staff, the culture that you're cultivating, the support system that we try to provide. Work-life balance is very important, but my philosophy is work alongside the team to get it done as fast as we can without killing anybody.

It's keeping your head afloat, right? We're always trying to keep track of everything that needs to get done, and a lot of things that we do we've never done before. So a lot of times it's kind of hard to give estimates or track stuff until we've done it once, and then we're like, okay, we kind of know how long this takes, and then we can start doing a production roadmap to say this is when this could get done. The more times we do it, the more metrics we have and the more averages we have. We've done this 10 times now. We know it's taken this much time each time. Average that number out and we've got a pretty good idea. Tracking that data is what's really important.

It is very important. It's very difficult without the right team, but it is very important, especially because we move fast. Every time you add a new element to that process, it generally changes the bid. Forrest and I were working together early on on characters, when the pipeline was in its infantile stages. Forrest has done some great work, the team's now doing awesome stuff, but that initial number we got for how long a character takes, we were so proud of that number. In our pipeline, in our process, with our team, what does it take to build a character from start to finish with one artist, right? You generally do man-months, or by individuals. But now, as the team's grown, as the pipeline's adjusted slightly, as things have gotten more efficient, some things have gotten a little harder, we've gotten more people in play, that changes your bids. So you start with that number, but that's probably not going to get you to the end. It might be faster, it might be slower, but it's fun.

And once you have all your tasks and your bids laid out, then you can start doing stuff like, okay, to get all this stuff done, it's going to take until like 2022. Then you're like, okay, but we only have one resource. So what if we had four resources? And then you see how it goes, and it allows you on the production side to balance all of these, to get your numbers into when you need to release by. And obviously there are other factors, like you bring on new people, there's the ramp-up time and stuff like that. The challenge is growing a company and still developing at the same time and trying to keep track of everything. So it's a tough job.