Feature: 'Producers Of The Roundtable: Structuring Your Team'

Author: by Staff

Gamasutra's latest 'Producers Of The Round Table' discussion looks at team structure, with producers from Gas Powered Games, Stainless, Red Storm and Freeverse analyzing how game teams are constructed to function smoothly. One of the first questions asked in the detailed feature is: 'How do you deal with structuring your team in terms of different disciplines reporting to leads?' In this case, Robbie Edwards, senior producer at Red Storm Entertainment (Tom Clancy's Rainbow Six series), explained of his set up: "Underneath the producer, we have leads for design, art and engineering for their respective departments within the team. We then break down the departments further into disciplines that are small groups of similarly skilled developers lead by a single workgroup coordinator. For the most part, these workgroups consist solely of one department, but in a few cases, they are cross departmental." An alternate view was provided by Ben Gunstone, production director at Stainless Games (Happy Tree Friends: False Alarm), who explained of his developer: "On all of our games we have a lead artist and a lead coder. Ideally we also have a design lead as well but with the smaller download titles that design lead is normally spread across multiple projects. From there it is completely flat. Our teams are smaller, though, than normal retail products, normally looking at two to three artists and two to four coders per game, so there isn't room for any more levels of hierarchy." You can now read the full Gamasutra feature on the subject, including lots more specifics on how producers structure game development teams.