What Does a Producer Do?

Gertz here! I am the new Executive Producer here at MCDM, and we figured it would be a good time to tell you all a little about what that means.

It's been 3 months now since I've joined the awesome MCDM team and MCDM community and while I have been somewhat silent, aside from showing up in a random stream and chatting in the MCDM Discord where appropriate (link your Patreon and Discord Account here if you havent already), I've been pretty busy.

To say this is the largest number of products that the team has worked on at one time would be an understatement. It’s a lot and I expect one of the reasons I was brought on board.

The MCDM Hero Book, The MCDM Monster Book, The Ajax Mini, sourcing and producing MCDM Djordi Dice, a Map of Vasloria, and a VTT. We are also delivering regular tester packets, James and Matt stream regularly, and we provide patreon posts at least once a week like this one.

With that said, I'll answer the age old question of, “What would you say you do here?” and I'm going to use this space to delve into the wonderful world of Project Management. With all of those things in progress at the same time it's very easy to get overwhelmed with everything that needs to get done and also, are we going to get done in time?

My job is to sift through the chaos and provide a roadmap for people. Then, adjust the plan as things change.

“Plans are worthless, but planning is everything.” - Dwight D. Eisenhower

Meaning that a plan is not something that can remain static once created. It is ever changing from the moment it starts being executed and must continually adapt until the goal is met. At the same time, the goal post can often change.

How many Ancestries will we have in the book? How many Classes? How many Downtime Activities? All are questions that can change along with the plan. If we are running out of page count, we may have to cut a Class. Running out of time, maybe we have to cut a few illustrations from the final layout. Running out of budget, well that's more cuts.

We adapt the plan to the current constraints. This can happen daily—one meeting can disrupt the entire roadmap—but it's important to not think of it as an annoyance but as new knowledge that allows you to make a more informed decision than the previous day.

What's also important is that we have as much information as possible as soon as possible so our options, when we have to make a change, are more vast than just cutting some amount of content to make it work.

With all that said, let's add some visuals and a simple plan. Let's start with five Ancestry Illustrations done by a single artist and each takes 3 weeks to do.

Well this means it'll take 75 total working days to complete the 5 illustrations. What about holidays and vacation? Welp, with all that factored in we end up finishing 5 illustrations on October 22nd if we start July 1st.

But wait, it's never that straight forward, we need to do some conceptual design before we create the illustrations. MCDM Dwarves are not the same as common fantasy Dwarves. Who else has Memonek? Lets add these in and make them a dependency for the illustrations.

Welp, now we get done right in time for Thanksgiving on Nov 27th.

You can see this obviously won't work for getting everything we need done in a timely fashion, but we are lucky because we have three artists and we can use contractors for work. Now when we use contractors, we have a step in between where we create an art brief for the contractor. This is to get a quote for the work, and so we get what we need back in as few iterations as possible. This is usually the conceptual design work and additional reference along with the specifications for the final file format, resolution, etc.

This final chart shows what happens if two internal artists handle the conceptual design and art brief and then hand off to one of many contractors for the final illustration.

This has us finishing on Aug 16th for the 5 items shown. A dramatic difference from the original timeline even though we have added a step to create the art brief.

Consider this: This is for five Ancestries and focused on just the illustration. There is also the design, the prose, and getting it all to layout for review. There are also all the meetings in between we have for each of these so everyone is on the same page. Now expand that to classes, then kits, then rewards, and all the other sections of just the Hero Book. Then multiply it for every product we are trying to get done.

It's far too complex for someone to keep in their head and things change so fast that you have to keep up with the adjustments daily. To keep things as close to accurate and up to date as possible we use a number of tools. In our case, we chose to use JIRA (as seen above in the screenshots), since it can both manage individual tasks and allows for roadmapping.

We also want to make it really easy on the team to manage tasks. JIRA has a very simple interface called a Kanban Board which allows the team to drag drop tickets from To Do, to In Progress, and then Done with no roadblocks. It's also adjustable if we want to add to it later, and the team knows that they are ordered from top to bottom in terms of what needs to get done first.

JIRA also allows for great visualization of data. We have a Dashboard setup for people to see all the work on them but broken down by person, department, and overall. We can also make this dynamic by having it broken down for the current logged in user so it always shows you data relative to the person looking at it. (Don’t worry about poor Nick there, he manages all of the art contractors' tasks.)

This is a big part of what I do, and the above example is one we actually discussed internally. We talk through the process, codify that process into a roadmap for others, work through making it more efficient, and then present the plan to the team. Rinse and repeat as needed.

We then use JIRA to create all these dashboards, filters, tasks relative to what needed to get done and try to make it as easy and as informative as possible.

Another thing to note is that efficiency for efficiency sake is not always the best solution. When you force efficiency, it eventually comes with sub-par work—either because you try to squeeze time away from an estimate or people don't get to work on cool shit they want to work on and are passionate about, so they get frustrated.

A designer or artist here shouldnt get bogged down in creating their own tasks, making sure every department is prioritized on the same things, and making sure the 1000’s of tasks needed to complete the book are getting done on time. That's my job. They should be making art or designing the game.

—Gertz