How QTE makes developers lazy

Recently I'm reading a book called "The ultimate guide to video game writing and design". As soon as the introduction, the authors admit that "the book is not a contemplative work that is meticulously structured and certain of its conclusions", which is pretty much a complete opposite of "ultimate guide", but fortunately, it gets a bit better later. Even though the book is quite far from perfect, it shows quite well how the designers approach the design.

In early chapters authors emphasise the importance of gameplay as a narrative element, but a few chapters later, when they get to the point and list the storytelling tools that every game writer or designer has in his arsenal, they somehow focus on dialogues, voiceovers and cutscenes, forgetting the gameplay completely, but... that's how it is.

image stolen from Destructoid :)

It is actually pretty rare to see the story shown through actual gameplay. To do so, you have to consider a shitload of scenarios, where players just do something we don't want them to to. It's just so much easier to make the puppets on the screen move the way the designers or writers want them to. So the most common approach is: let the player shoot some random things between the checkpoints and then just feed him some more story. Even the biggest and best titles we all cherish did it. If you look at Final Fantasy VII, popularly voted the best one in the series, it also told 90% of the story with long cutscenes and dialogues. It is still one of the best games of all times.

This approach worked fine for quite a long time. But people started to get bored with so many dialogues and cutscenes: "Hey, let us play already!". The western gamedevs solved the problem right away with an option to skip cutscenes, the eastern ones often kept sticking to "watch the damn cutscene, we are telling you the story" a lot longer. And then came the savior of the decade - Quick Time Event.

stolen from http://cenaf.newgrounds.com/

This smart little thingy was a literal and metaphorical gamechanger. Developers no longer had to hold back with the length of elements that didn't engage the player. It became enough to script in mindless button mashing when the scene got too long. Apparently, the players are happy to watch a chunk of pre-scripted series of actions if we only let them to press a button once in a while. If they succeed, the game goes on. If they don't, they need to try again.

Some would argue that QTE has let us express a lot more in games. We can make the character do pretty much anything and the player stays engaged. We are not limited to the number of buttons the gamepad has with our actions. The character can jump, climb, swim, shoot, turn wheels, dodge, smash barrels... Anything we want, with this marvel of situational controls.

I happen to completely disagree. Immersion is when we forget we have a gamepad in our hands. When we just become one with the character. When we know our moves so well that we don't have to think what we are doing anymore. We are not thinking "Press X to jump" - we are just jumping. Being constantly prompted on the screen is just plain annoying - it's like the game knows that it failed to teach you the controls, so it's constantly providing you with a live manual.

Let's analyze the 2 most common gamepads - they all have 8 action buttons that are commonly used. They have Select/Back and Start, usually reserved for accessing menus, but that can be used for pretty much anything. They have 2 sticks that can be pressed. They have directional buttons that get used more and more for stuff other than walking around. It makes a total of 16 various actions that can be done with pressing a single button. Not to mention that by combining 2 buttons (pretty common) we can make our character perform another 120 actions. That's a lot. Frankly speaking, the 8-16 base buttons is more than enough for 99% of the games out there.

Look at Journey - you jump, fly, slide, run, activate pictures, open gates, communicate with other players, power up other players, replenish your energy... All that with just left stick and 2 (!) buttons! And there's no prompt there after the quickest tutorial ever, you have no QTE to make these 2 buttons do everything you need, you don't need lenghty cutscenes or dialogues to tell the story.

Sure, in some cases QTE might be fun and "on spot", but let's face it - most of the time it is just a lazy way to pretend there is some kind of gameplay in moments when there is none. The mechanic itself is quite primitive and has nothing to do with immersion. There are two main uses for it. One is helping the player sit through a cutscene or dialogue - useful, when the cutscene or dialogue aren't engaging by themselves or when the developers need to resolve to loads of cutscenes to tell the story they can't convey through gameplay. Second is to make the player character perform actions that are outside the basic controlling options - useful when the designers haven't thought the controls through.

Whenever you see a QTE in a game, think for a moment, what the developers would have to do to still engage the player without this trick. What if Square, instead of adding QTE in XIII-2 decided to ensure the story makes sense? What if Capcom never heard of QTE - maybe Resident Evil would still be a survival horror instead of a cutscene-heavy action shooter?

Managing Expectations

Two weeks ago I borrowed two games from work - yes, having a game library is one of the perks in most gamedev studios. One was Lollipop Chainsaw, the other Deus Ex: Human Revolution. It got me thinking about things we expect from games and how much these expectations affect our reception of a game.

There are generally two reactions to Lollipop Chainsaw: "Another game about boobs? Grow up." and "A busty blonde cheerleader killing zombies with a chainsaw? Count me in!". It doesn't matter which category you are in, you don't expect a compelling story. You don't expect characters you will be identifying yourself with. You don't expect any breakthrough in mechanics or gameplay. All you want is to have fun whacking hordes of zombies. Comments like "Killing people is fun when they are Zombies" only confirm that the game doesn't want to lie what it delivers.

Therefore, when you reach moments where you run zombies over with a combine harvester, when you get inside oldschool arcade games, when you get to ride the chainsaw to collect bonuses on your way, you just get an unexpected, nice bonus. When I heard Children of Bodom in the soundtrack instead of Californian punk, I immediately gave the game +1 on my personal scale. What's more, when you start the game, your mind is already ready to accept an extremely abstract world, where Juliette's boyfriend is just a head dangling next to her skirt. Finding giant lollipops or giant coin medals is not an immersion breaker. You just take it as a part of this irrational world design. 

Deus Ex comes with it's 90 metascore, with well-written cyberpunk world, a whole episode of Extra Credits where they sing the song of glory for the game. It resurrects a respected franchise. It brings Adam, a bastard child of Batman and Neo, who can be augmented in so many cool ways. It lets you decide how you want to play through your game - you can sneak around, hack, persuade or just blow things up. You get loads of various quests, deal with the main intrigue as much as interact with the futuristic city. You can acquire access to thousands of e-mails and palmtops that tell you the stories of pretty much every person in the building you are in. Impressive, huh?

Then how come it's so boring!? Why does searching someone's desk always mean hacking into his computer? Why does sneaking mean spending so much time in identical vent shafts? Why is it nearly impossible for 5 guys to kill you if you hide behind a desk - you just take them out like ducks on a shooting range. The world is incredibly detailed and well-thought. Level design shines and the plot throws you in the middle of a mature game that's supposed to be making you wonder what humanity is. Problem is... you get thrown out of it all the time. You find some dirt on a corrupted cop, you confront him and he sings like a bird... with a civilian standing maybe a meter from him. You can see her in the background all the time so clearly that you don't care what he says, you just keep facepalming at how irrational the situation is. Just behind him sits another guy that you have to talk to for at least 5 minutes, but instead of hearing his story, you just keep wondering whether it's hair or maybe brain growing out of his skull. Seriously, hair looked better in games made 7 years before DE: HR.

Hello, Jensen, would you like to touch my hairbrain?

If you reached so far in my post you are probably asking yourself "Is this noob trying to say that Lollipop Chainsaw is a better game than Deus Ex: Human Revolution?" No, it's not about being a better game here. Yes, I had a lot more fun with Lollipop Chainsaw and yes, the new Deus Ex did let me down. Can I objectively say Lollipop is a better game? Probably not. That brings us to the very topic of this post.

Before we even play a game, we are attacked by opinions, by the hype surrounding the bigger titles. We are biased by our own sentiments to the franchise or by some vague imaginary values we associate with ones we heard about but never actually tried. If you didn't play any of these 2 games and read my post, you will probably expect much more from LC than I did and you might be disappointed. You might expect much less from DE: HR and have loads of fun. My post will be the element that affected your expectations.

A great part of the game-related PR is expectations management. Obviously, everyone wants to sell their product, so they will always be exposing the elements and features strongest in their game. One of the biggest tasks in selling Lollipop Chainsaw was making a cosplay contest to choose the right girl to promote the game on conventions. In Deus Ex, it was hyping up the audience about the world you can explore, the relevant choices that you are going to make and the variety of mechanics that will let you play the game exactly the way you want to.

Just showing off the cool stuff sounds like an easy job? Not really. It is easy with titles like Lollipop Chainsaw or Dead or Alive. Boobs are boobs. Round, come in pairs, defy gravity. DOA5 confused their audience for a moment with some babbling about advanced boob physics, but luckily for them, the pictures were still pretty self-explanatory. Let's analyze the message examples I glued to Deus Ex however. World exploration strongly implies a sandboxy open-world while it might mean "only" the ability to find a lot of hidden passages and lots of notes to get to know the world better. Relevant choices can imply that you will be strongly changing the world and story around you while it might mean "only" the possibility to freely customise your character's development, affecting your future gameplay. Variety of mechanics implies you will be overwhelmed with your options, but it can just mean you can either shoot or hide with nothing exciting about any of the options. Even if you were telling the truth the whole time, some people will feel lied to anyway.

I guess that after so many paragraphs you expect me to somehow sum up this fun rant, so I will invent a proverb. You can then judge by yourself if it did or didn't meet your expectations. So here goes:

Success lies within mixing the right amount of depth and boobs. :)

How did games distort your reality?

Hey guys! During my last vacation I visited some old castles. After one little event, I suddenly did the House M.D. thing - you know, when he shuts up and walks out of the room, because he just had this brilliant idea that has a high chance of killing the patient. I took a little look back at my previous vacation and some other actions I took, and came to a conclusion that... games majorly distorted my reality. 

Exhibit A: The Triforce

The picture below was taken on Gran Canaria, near to some cathedral or botanical garden, in a pretty little town that would make everyone wanna take a slow, quiet stroll, taking in everything around. This noob just looked down and instinctively started to looking for his ocarina to play the Song of Time. Needless to say, it's the only picture I took in that town. 

Exhibit B: GPS walking

The picture below is not mine, but it's pretty damn accurate. I sometimes get directions from my phone, but even if the target is just a few meters away, I keep the navigation on. Why? Because it is fun to see your progress tracked by an electronic device. Because it is just like a minimap in a game, showing you your position, your way, your quest's destination, points of interest - it only lacks NPC's and mob locations.

Exhibit C: My staircase.

Back to the real pictures - it's my actual staircase. As you can see, I live on the top floor of a block without a lift. It's a nice exercise most of the time, but getting home from the saturday's grocery shopping (30-40 kilograms in total) can be a bitch. At some point I counted that there are 8 stair segments and one final section between the top of the stairs and my door. Nine in total. Fifteen seconds later, it ceased to be nine elements. A progress bar appeared, and clearing every segment was getting the progress bar up by 11% - arriving at the door became 99%, turning the key a rewarding 100%. This might sound really fucked up, but it actually made the shopping bags lighter - I knew the progress, the remaining distance. For the last years, I do this progress bar thingy every time I climb the stairs with something heavy.

Exhibit D: The grassland

This was a more one-time thing. After playing Skyrim for a few hours, I got out on a walk and first thing I wanted to do is clicking on the purple flowers in the grass to collect them. Picture from google maps, but showing the spot.

Exhibit E: The stepping stone

Finally, the thing that I mentioned in the beginning. When walking around one of the castle ruins, me and my girl came across a square block sticking out of the floor. Took less than a second to think "if we step on it, a door will open". So we did and even though the block didn't move, there was actually a sound of something happening somewhere. We knew it was a coincidence - some kid probably dropped his wooden sword on the floor. We still looked at each other, smiled and started searching. Didn't find anything, so we came back to the block, continuing the fun. We knew that in games with 2 characters sometimes one has to stand on the block while the other goes through the hidden door and pulls a lever. She stepped on the block, no sound this time. "It must be broken" we stated and went to search for another adventure.

Should we start taking meds?

A game nerd probably loled at most of these examples. A person who doesn't play games probably thinks I'm mentally sick. Hell - even if I am, at least I'm having fun. I am also aware how heavily this post approaches the topic of gamification. Maybe I'll write a separate article on it at some point, but for now, dear reader, I just want to ask you a question: how did games distort your reality and how do you like it?

Working in gamedev: Stability

The stability of a job in gamedev is a topic that might be somewhat controversial. I'll just go ahead and reach conclusion in the first paragraph, then I'll elaborate on that some more. The conclusion is: you never know when the shit will hit the fan. Actually, there are invisible fans everywhere and the colors of shit would amaze a veteran proctologist. On the other hand, you may also be the ape throwing that shit.

Imagine you are a young developer, starting in a company of pretty much any size. It is nearly impossible for you to stay in the company for your whole professional life. It is highly unlikely that you will be there for 10 years. You most probably won't be there even five. If you somehow manage to reach the average, you will work in this hypothetical studio anywhere between a year and three. Why? There may be a number of reasons for that.

Dynamics of the industry
Gamedev is a very young industry. New companies keep popping up and dying on a daily basis. The digital distribution, among other things, causes the whole industry to act in a quite unique manner: even the smallest players can considerably affect the whole market. Current situation in Square Enix clearly shows that even the giants can stand on feet of clay. Sometimes a success of a company comes almost overnight and sometimes they struggle for years having problems with paying their employees. In most cases there is no dishonor in abandoning a sinking ship and catching a cruise on a Titanic for a "change".

Development cycle
If you think about it, preproduction requires a lot less people than production. In bigger companies, with multiple projects, this isn't a problem. While the army of artists and programmers is delivering a game, another, smaller team is preparing another title, so this army can easily jump in once they finish the previous one. In smaller companies however, it happens that after delivering a game, over a half of the team becomes useless for a significant period of time and in many cases the company can't really afford that. So... there are layoffs, but don't worry, because...

Projects, not companies
Most developers don't identify themselves with the company anyway! It might be sad for some people, and I know HR managers are struggling with it constantly, but loyalty among game developers is about as common as cheerleaders dating nerds. If someone is finishing a project, he rarely just looks for another opportunity in his company. He looks around the city, country, even world, depending on his current mobility. Even people in the middle of projects can get "stolen" to other companies, if they realize there is an opportunity to work on a kind of game they like more - an RTS instead of an FPS or RPG for instance.

Conflicts
Most gamedev studios are pretty small and the atmosphere encourages people to get more personal and less professional in their relations. Add to that stressful crunch seasons, where people deprived of sleep are seeing each other for long, long hours. Conflicts resulting in someone quitting or getting fired are more common than you might think.

Personal development
I mentioned elements of it in previous reasons, but I think it deserves a separate one. Studios often focus on certain types of games. Unless there are some secret projects I don't know about, you won't gain experience in shooters working for Blizzard. You won't do RPG's with Rovio. Very often, in order to broaden your experience or just try something new, you have to switch between studios. It freshens up your perspective too. Also, for many ambitious types there comes a time when creating someone's game just isn't enough and they decide to add to the "dynamics of the industry" factor.

From what I've seen so far, these are the main reasons for people to migrate like crazy within the industry. If you stay in a medium-sized studio for a year, around 30% of your colleagues will be replaced with new faces in that time. You probably guessed that QA is the department seeing changes most often, but - surprise, surprise - the close second place is people outside the trenches - marketing, PR, HR, finance, etc. Of course I don't have statistics from all gamedev studios in the world, but it can't be a coincidence that, after only a year, from all the HR managers that I happened to be in contact with none still works in companies I applied to.

To see the intensity of employee migration, it is enough to look at the graph PC Gamer published in 2011. It depicts the journey of some core Blizzard employees and how they migrated throughout industry, affecting it in the process, but also how they were chasing opportunities to make different games. Take Tyler Thompson for instance. After working on Diablo II he migrated twice and ended up working on... The Sims III.

I highly encourage you to enlarge this image and dedicate 5 minutes to analyzing it.

If you ask me, this whole situation is extremely healthy. I have worked for companies where people were kept because of their connections, because of their knowledge that the employer didn't want to leak out, even because their position was some long lost artifact that somehow escaped several downsizing attempts. I can't say for sure that game industry is free of cases like that, but I can bet that there's considerably less of them. If you value stability and rewards for 25 years in the company are among your career goals, gamedev is definetely not an industry for you.

Music and sound in games - why don't we care?

A while ago I posted my article on graphics killing gameplay on LinkedIn and it caused a pretty heated off-topic discussion about... the sound in games! Some really great points were made and even though I am not a music expert in any way, but since I have ears and they are not just a decoration, I can have an opinion as well.

The biggest problem of the sound in games is... it is done for a selected minority of the players. When our Audio Director assesses the sound in our games and forgets to close the door, half of the studio hears the game. He needs to listen to it loudly, to hear every underlying tone of every sound, voice or tune. He needs to listen to it on a 5.1 set (most common layout for surround sound, used in cinemas and home cinema sets) to assess how the sound works in the space around the player. When I was on a sound feedback session, we had to shout to each other over the sounds of the game. 

Now who listens to the games so loud? People have kids they don't want to wake up. Parents that tell them to turn it down. Wives that want to hear their own thoughts. One of biggest fans of Dark Souls I know didn't even know a Fire Keeper in Anor Londo was a woman, because he played with no sound, not to disturb anyone. I play every MMO without music and with sound either off or muffled, to listen to my Winamp. How many people have a 5.1 set connected to their PC or console? I tried to find a number, but my googling fervour ends around the fifth site. I would guess that it is much less than 50% of the players. Furthermore, look at all these professional gamers - they are using headsets. Stereo headsets. Summing all this up we come to the conclusion above. A small minority of players will actually hear, experience and appreciate all the hard work that the sound people put in the game.

There are people who raise a point that gaming audio is some laughable variation of a proper sound engineering and that it is heavily underfunded. Whether that is true or not - why would game developers want to develop audio even further when it is already beyond comprehension of a statistical player? Take a look at Fable - guys at Lionhead hired Danny Elfman to write the opening theme. They invested cash. Did it make the game any better or make the players love it more? I don't think so. It didn't even help Elfman escape Tim Burton's clutches :)

Why is it that people don't care about the proper sound? They all want to have big screens, they all want to have better graphics, but soundwise the majority of gamers is still in the Sound Blaster Live! era ("yeah, we heard of 5.1 and it's nice, but we don't yet have it..."). We all buy dedicated graphic cards, while the audio chips on motherboards are usually good enough for us. 

It is all because of the way we perceive sound. Sound isn't as limited to screen as graphics. It is a true 3D. It actually fills the room we are in. Our brain is capable of registering much more sounds than graphical objects at once and there can be multiple sounds in one place while there can be only one graphical object in one place. It all seems pretty cool and would seem that simply sound > graphics. Well, the graphic needs us to focus. We need to look at the screen, we consciously do it while the sound just does its work whether we think about it or not. That difference in conscious usage is a reason why we are focus on graphics so much and just let the audio be or mute it when it is interrupting someone. After all, if people had to choose between being blind or deaf, vast majority would choose deaf.

To illustrate, how little the players know or care about the sound, I'll share an experience that shocked me. A few months back our game prototype went to playtests. A selected group of players and reviewers got their hands on it. The prototype had graphics and gameplay we worked on really hard, but a completely placeholder audio. Still, the audio got the highest notes. Asked about the sounds, people were pointing to the music changing depending on a scenery or action on the screen. They didn't realize there were missing footsteps or that the same crow sings over and over in the background, that all the sounds have more or less the same volume... Those were not only players. Those were also professional reviewers. People who are supposed to know at least a little about this stuff!

Take a look at the game reviews - most of them are, apart from the general score, giving notes in terms of video, sound and gameplay. Have you ever seen a reviewer that writes about sound for more than a short paragraph? What was in the paragraph? A sentence about ingame music. Sometimes they mention that the soundtrack is great. Rarely something about voice acting or whether an actor was or wasn't irritating. Are these all the sounds you hear in the game? I can certainly understand how memorable soundtracks can enrich the game. I've been listening to Chrono Cross soundtrack for over ten years now. Still, soundtracks and voice acting are far from being all there is about the sound in games.

If you don't turn the sound on during a game, you might die after about 120 seconds ;)
Jokes aside, check out the cool study I linked just below.

There are studies that show us the importance of the game sound. You don't even have to analyze it closely. The graphs clearly show that the average heart and respiration rates are always lower when playing with no sound. The player is just much less engaged without the sound. Regardless of the game type! It is obvious that in Silent Hill or BioShock the sound plays an important role. You can hear something's going to happen way before it happens. You can hear the enemies long before you see them and it builds up the tension. The linked study shows however, that even in a simple 2D shooter sound makes the game more engaging. 

You don't need to be a rocket scientist to figure out that with this state of things, sound in games will be constantly underfunded. Evolution of sound effects will be slow, painful and very hard to notice. Mostly, because we - the players, don't encourage any developer that this evolution is necessary or even wanted. I rarely appeal to anyone with anything, but making my own rules has an advantage of bending them to the needs of a certain moment :) This will be one of these rule-benders:

Dear fellow gamers! If you are at least half-serious about your hobby, get a 5.1 sound system. It's already a 20 years old technology and it's really affordable now. Without it, you cannot experience the whole game. You are paying $60 for the title and are depriving yourself from a part of its value right away. Check out what cool things the sound guys can do with it. Turn up the volume, enjoy. After all, playing a game without proper sound is like eating a pizza without tomato sauce. When you look at it, there's everything you normally see on a pizza - cheese, ham, mushrooms and veggies, but it doesn't really taste as it should, does it?

Dear reviewers! If you want to just assess the game's music, just name it music, not sound or audio. If you wanna review audio, review all of it, not just the catchy tunes. Know your shit, guys - your readers depend on you!

Evoland - the study of game design evolution

When it comes to this game, I am probably in the most biased group that exists. I am completely aware that it is made exactly for people like me. The ones that can't decide whether they liked Final Fantasy VII or The Legend of Zelda: Ocarina of Time more. I am pretty sure the guys responsible for Evoland are sitting on the same fence and hell, we are all feeling quite cosy here. 

Evoland is a game about games. To be more specific, it is a game about evolution of two brilliant series of jRPG - Final Fantasy and The Legend of Zelda. It borrows almost everything from these games and as a huge fan, I was enjoying every tiniest bit of it. Every gag, every little mechanic, every little reference made me smile or straight out laugh and run to my wife to first explain the background to her, then tell her the joke and then get angry that she doesn't get it.

Guys from Shiro Games came up with a really cool mechanic: opening chests rewards you with new game features! You start in black and white 2D world where you can only go right and evolve it into a 3D world that gets textures, prerendered backgrounds, higher resolution, better music. But the evolution isn't limited only to graphics or music quality. You get awarded such things as enemies, inventory, health bars, breakable pots and pushable crates or random encounters and turn-based battle! You get all kinds of game elements that upgrade your experience from earliest 80's to the first decade of the current century.

Almost all the mechanics that you can uncover are taken straight from either FF or TLOZ, and later a bit from Diablo. Since it is a game about game evolution, it wouldn't make sense to add some new revolutionary mechanics that didn't exist before. The designers decided that there's no use hiding their fascination with the two titles. They even went a step further. Everything in Evoland reminds us of two studied series: names of characters, shape of an airship, sword design, mood of a town, battle menu layout and color... All these are an honest tribute to the two great series.

Putting aside my undying sentiment to last century RPGs, Evoland does one thing that I am not sure it intended to do, but it does it extremely well. It actually teaches the player a lot about game design. Every new element that you discover in Evoland gives you new ways to interact with the environment. When someone plays a regular game, he is given a series of mechanics that are usually complimenting each other in a fluent way. He rarely analyzes how they affect the general gameplay and interact with each other. In Evoland you never get two new mechanics at once, letting you focus on one element at a time. And it shows you, how this element changes the game. How adding NPC's adds a dialogue option. How placing a key in a chest forces level designers to place an unlockable door somewhere and how it affects the level design options.

One other aspect that is just exemplary in Evoland is the learning curve. It introduces every single element separately, starting from scratch - moving right. Every time a new gameplay bit appears, you get to use it right away. You get a key - you open a door. You get a bomb - you blow up a wall. You never have to wonder what, when and how to do. And you are never attacked by tutorials or popping up hot tips.

The game is short - only a few hours of gameplay. But also, it's €10 worth of a game design analysis of two greatest jRPG series. There's no denying Final Fantasy and The Legend of Zelda series, at least in the last century, were all very good games. Seeing them broken down to single pieces introduced one by one is of indisputable value for every designer. I would be in a pickle if I were to choose between spending $10 on a book about game design or on Evoland.

Jobs in gamedev: Producer (part 1)

Just lately this noob has been promoted to an Associate Producer (yay!). After nine months on the job, doing my best to coordinate the production tasks I think I can fairly certainly say... Damn, I still don't really know what being a producer really is all about. Therefore, I am putting "part 1" in the title, but part 2 won't follow straight after it. I will probably write part 2 in a year or two, just to revise and maybe contradict the statements I will make today.

So many producers...

If you look at all the "kinds" of producers, you can find out such names as Producer, Executive Producer, Junior Producer, Associate Producer, Senior Producer, or even such weird thingies as Art Producer, Design Producer or Technical Producer. What is the difference between them? In many cases, it strongly depends on the company, but generally speaking, the main difference is the level of competencies and responsibilities. The core concept of the job stays the same whether you are a Junior Producer or Executive Producer. The only real difference is the number of decissions you will be expected to make and broadness of topics you will have to cover.

A producer in gamedev is kinda like a manager

In this case it means that he's as much everyone's boss as he is everyone's bitch. From all the info I've gathered so far, his role varies greatly throughout the life of the project. Producer needs to know what everyone in the project is doing and why. He manages the priorities of the tasks and is responsible for achieving the milestones within planned deadlines and budget. This part is almost like any other project management in any given company. On the other hand, however, producer can often be the guy that does things others don't have time to do. It can be anything from covering for a sick animator at a motion capture session, through attending meetings that just popped out, running the team's Twitter, helping with the game's slogan or logotype, to all the things people in the trenches don't have time to do while crunching: ordering lunch, helping QA check out the latest build or the most basic and tedious jobs, like renaming files, creating backups or watching the progress bar of the compiling build as the programmer gets his 15 minutes of rest. It is also quite safe to say that if there is a task where nobody knows whose responsibility it is, it is most probably producer's.

Job of a producer, despite its name, is one of the few jobs in development that doesn't produce any assets for the game. Producer doesn't code, doesn't animate, write, design or draw. His job is to make sure everyone who actually produces assets, does the job they are supposed to be doing. There may be moments where a producer gets to add something to the game, like a line of dialogue or some idea for a feature, but it is never in his job description.

Producer = an universal translator

You need some serious people skills for this job. It is pretty common that people involved in the project are all on the same page, all wanting the same thing, and still arguing over it, mostly because they are just miscommunicating. That's where the producer can shine, serving as a facilitator, translator or decission maker. In many cases, instead of making a decission, producer's role is to make the right people talk about the right thing and just observe the result, eventually, if it's necessary, choose one of two options that are presented.

The way I see it, the aim of every producer should be to speak as many languages as it is humanely possible. I'm not talking foreign languages, although English is a must and man, I wish I knew Chinese and Hindi. There are other, more important languages though. A producer should be able to speak business, art, programming, marketing, legal, PR, hardware, software, design, poetry, math and depending what kind of game he's working on, languages like medieval weaponry, womens clothing, dogs, space travel or alien mutants ninja hot dogs. Why? Because anyone in the team can approach the producer and everyone expects him to understand what they are talking about. So he should be the nerdiest nerd when among nerds and the most reliable business partner when with investors.

I remember when I got one of the first e-mails from a guy responsible for, among other things, compatibility of the engine with APIs. The mail was somewhere around 10 sentences long and I have spent at least an hour deciphering it with help of Google and Wikipedia. And well, I managed to reply with some moderate understanding of the subject and ask questions that actually got us closer to reaching some conclusions and - in turn - solution. Sure, I could have replied "please tell me what you mean", but then I wouldn't be a discussion partner for him, and that's probably the last thing someone on a producer-related position wants.

Knowledge isn't the key - understanding is

Obviously, it is impossible for the producer to know everything: every detail of every task and every bit of everyone's job. Producer never has the greatest knowledge in any field. In any given aspect of game development there is always someone who knows more and better. That's why the producer first listens, then listens, then talks. One great thing is - as long as you are able to understand what people are telling you, it's fine. Nobody really expects you to have the in-depth comprehension of the subject.

I think that being a producer requires as much humility as audacity. On one hand, you need to know your own limitations and be able to trust the judgement of people responsible for their parts, on the other, you often get thrown into situations or dragged to meetings where you have a really faint idea what's going on and still need to take part in a productive way. Quick learning is probably one of the most important skills for a producer.

Great place to... start?

Paradoxically, an entry-level producer is a really great position to start your gamedev career. Sure, it is pretty demanding right from the start and you most probably need some prior project management experience, but it has one great perk no other position has. You can learn a lot about every element of making games. Being in the middle of it all, meeting with all the people inside your team and outside of it, you have the opportunity to see pretty much everything there is to be seen. In a mere 9 months on the almost-producer job, I was taking part in countless visual art feedbacks, some music feedbacks, a motion capture session (also as an actor!), a creative session regarding the story, business meetings regarding the future of the project, QA tasks, focus tests analysis, cutscenes planning... And if I wanted and/or had any basic skills to do so, I could have tried out any kind of 2D or 3D software or played with the engine. I can't imagine any other position that would enable me to learn this much in equally short period of time.