The best production talks of GDC

gamedeveloper.com:

Game production isn't always the most glorious or heralded work in this industry, but it's absolutely crucial to a smooth (or even functional) development process. Producers organize and facilitate every aspect of game dev, and some of the best talks (and interviews) the Game Developer crew wrote up at GDC 2023 this year not only reflected this importance — they also had your truly taking copious notes for my own practice. We couldn't attend every talk (we'll be checking Vault for the rest), but here are a few of our favorites. We're also including interviews with Alt.Ctrl.GDC creators and IGF finalists, who had particular production challenges and solutions to share.

Terrible Toybox Lead Producer Jenn Sandercock revealed a treasure trove of secrets from the creation of last year's Return to Monkey Island.

"We made sure in our sprint meetings [that] we had six or less people in a meeting, [and made] sure it was just people within the same discipline," she said. "If we had more than that, the meeting would go for a lot longer and a bunch of people would be listening to work which wasn't very relevant to them. We made sure we would ask retrospective questions ahead of time so that people have time to stop and think about what was going on for them. Or big questions. [We asked] 'what went well?' 'what could have gone better?"

One bit of advice I personally loved (and might steal for our own tasks here at Game Developer) was the system of estimating task person-hours. The team used t-shirt sizes, from extra small all the way to multiple XL (and with cute animal emoji). Team members could give a very clear estimate based on this colorful criteria, and, naturally, adjustments could be made from there as needed.

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