Talent Pool: Management and Hiring Issues


"Remember the old project manager motto: Check, check, double-check ! Do it! And do it again and then again! (Do you want me to repeat that?)"

Thomas Howalt , project manager, Anarchy Online

As is common for most major game software projects, a producer will lead the actual day-to-day activities of the development team. Depending on the size of the company, there may also be an executive producer above the producer, guiding one or more other projects as well. Unlike software projects in other industries, however, project managers are not generally considered vital operations personnel. For the most part, the tasks of tracking milestones and tasks fall on an inexperienced assistant producer who is being groomed for later management. For that matter, because publishers are still young in the online game industry, the top leadership of any project tends to be inexperienced.

However, experience should be the common denominator here. If you're starting a project without an executive producer/producer who has actual, hands-on experience with a PW online game and a detail-oriented project manager to keep everything on track, your problems are going to be magnified all the way down the line. Like a pebble rolling down a mountain of loose shale that eventually creates an unstoppable wall of rocks and boulders, one mistake early on can make the test process and launch a living hell. A PW game development project is a place for a project manager to show his or her organizational chops, not a place for him/her to cut his or her organization teeth. "An online game is a huge task, and it is very easy to lose track," notes Thomas Howalt, the project manager for Funcom's Anarchy Online ( AO ). "Check everything thoroughly again and again. Do not accept promises; you have to keep track of everything."

The team will be working with widely varied technology that will have to work together as flawlessly as possible on a 24/7/365 basis; because of this, and more so than on any other type of software project, online game teams have to be so rigorously organized and follow-up-oriented from the start that they make a crack emergency room team look positively rudderless.

The problem with this is, of course, that qualified leaders with the requisite experience are not exactly in abundant supply. In particular, finding an experienced and knowledgeable producer, project manager, lead client programmer, lead network/server programmer, lead designer, and director of CS is a non-trivial human resources challenge. There are few enough people with experience on the practical side of commercial online game development that those with experience are generally expensive. Be prepared to pay for expertise.

However, the base pay and benefits expense shouldn't be your only considerations here; not having the right people will cost you much more before development is done. Inexperience causes mistakes and delays, which end up costing more in resources ”that is, development money. "There are many mistakes which can and have been made in developing MMP titles," NCSoft's Richard Garriott told us. "Few people have worked on them and been exposed to these problems. Fewer yet are the people who really learned from these lessons. Those properly experienced people will be hard to find, yet essential to saving time and money."

And unlike the common run of game developers, who tend to be somewhat loose with coding procedures and quality control, you need people who respect good software development standards. "One of the top issues I keep in mind when forming a development team is to look for people experienced with formalized development and quality processes," Gordon Walton, the executive producer of The Sims Online and someone with over 20 years of experience in game development, told us. This is something that has been missing from game development in general and certainly from the online game world. Mention the concept of "total quality management (TQM)" to the average game developer and he/she will just stare back. Considering the average online game deals with code in a variety of languages and environments that must all work together, but that the industry as a whole is lacking in respect and implementation of solid quality standards, is it any wonder that many online games launch like a 16-year-old driving a stick shift for the first time?

To sum up: Trying to develop an online game without experienced online game management at the helm is asking for trouble. Whatever you have to pay to get them onboard, it is worth the cost because it will save you money in the long run.

The Rest of the Team

Once you have the experienced lead management team of producer, project manager, lead client programmer, lead network/server programmer, lead designer, CS director, and art director in place, the rest of the team will ”or should ”fall into place fairly naturally. You'll need various numbers of artists and 3D modelers, junior and senior programmers and engineers, network engineers , community relations folks, database people ”the drill is fairly well-known and experienced leaders usually know good people they can call on to fill the ranks.

The real issues are timing and numbers; when do you start hiring the various segments of the team and just how many of them do you need? As you'll read in Part II, "Design and Development Considerations," new teams tend to start hiring programmers and artists, and start coding and drawing right away. There seems to be some genetic imperative in game developers to show executives pretty pictures and "walk and talk" demos as soon as possible, even before there is a complete thought about the game. To be blunt: That's dumb.

Think in terms of vehicles: If writing code for a poker or cribbage game is like building a bicycle, then creating and testing Quake or Diablo might be like building and testing a car (Okay, maybe even a small airplane), and creating, testing, and launching a PW game is on the order of putting together a space shuttle ”bigger, faster, more expensive, with more and more interacting parts , and more systems within systems as you go up the scale of complexity. Also, as you get more complex, there are fewer chances to take the project back to the drawing board if/when things don't perform according to the design specifications. You can get back on a bicycle that crashes, and you can survive a sub-specification test drive in a prototype car. Shuttle launches that don't go according to plan are not as forgiving ; neither are PW launches.

If you're smart, you won't begin massive hiring until you have the game design and technical documents finished. When asked what mistakes online game development teams make during the development process, one of Richard Garriott's replies was, "Hiring people too soon." He added, "A great deal of groundwork can be done before you need the majority of the staff." That groundwork starts with a relatively small team whose concern is documentation and design, not simply code. The design process should result in documents for the game's design and technical underpinnings. See Part II for more information about these topics.

As to final numbers for team members : It all depends on how art-heavy your game is, and you won't be able to make an accurate assessment of that until the design process is completed. Moreover, the team will vary in size over time. Obviously, art-heavy games will go through a phase of "team bloat," in which the majority of people will be artists and/or modelers. See Table 2.3 for an example of sizing a team by development phase.

While small teams have been able to make some great strides in the past, the current trend is toward larger teams that scale up or down with development needs. Again, art needs seem to be the major culprit in this; online games are starting to approach standalone game standards, after having lagged behind for a couple decades. For a large publisher or developer concerned with the concepts of production values and added value, teams moving from the design phase to development have been any size from 12 to over 50, depending on the work needed at the time.

Table 2.3. Development Team Size by Phase

The table depicts an idealized three-year PW development phase. PWs have been consistent for exceeding the staffing numbers of this ideal, or launching on time with problems and spending an extra year or two cleaning up the resulting mess. Notable exceptions are few, Dark Age of Camelot with its relatively small team being the most famous.

graphics/02tafig03.gif



Developing Online Games. An Insiders Guide
Developing Online Games: An Insiders Guide (Nrg-Programming)
ISBN: 1592730000
EAN: 2147483647
Year: 2003
Pages: 230

flylib.com © 2008-2017.
If you may any questions please contact us: flylib@qtcs.net