A producer’s duties are somewhat difficult to define, especially in a team of 3.  Yes, there’s maintaining the bug tracker and keeping to a project time line but there’s quite a bit more on the personal and creative level going on.  One thing that is important to upholding sanity in a project is trusting your co-worker’s abilities.  Trusting in the abilities of your technical and artistic team lends to a certain amount of experimentation.  This is especially true if you’re not the most technically advanced in a technology-based industry. Game development is a minefield of problems and incompatibility.  What may be true about a game platform today is not necessarily true tomorrow.  If I can trust my team’s response to challenges, I can give a thumbs up to a project that might contain unfamiliar aspects.

Of course, it it much easier to trust in the core Tiny Mantis team than it is a freelancer.  Freelancer’s litter the sidewalk of NYC.  One would assume that with such a large talent pool that we could have new artists and programmers for every project. This is not only untrue but it is also highly undesirable.  When we find a freelancer that we like, we treat them well and hire them often.  Also, just because the talent pool is large does not mean that every candidate is a good fit for a project or even office mechanics.  I think it is wise to build up a stable of reliable talent that you can draw from dependent on the project. Projects usually do not come equipped with a learning curve so knowing who to call will definitely alleviate headaches in the future.  Furthermore, freelancers should check in periodically with businesses that they have a good relationship with.  Letting companies in on your schedule and reminding them of your existence usually pays off.

Even with the best freelancer in town, my job as producer is to facilitate development.  I usually try to ensure that the end client does not have direct access to the feelancer and vice versa.  This way, I can filter discussions to provide just the needed facts.  Sometimes, the client and the freelancer must interact and in that case my job becomes more of a moderator.  This allows the freelancer to focus on development and gives me another angle to track the project.

Tracking the project is another issue when the work is spread among people who may or may not be on site and who may or may not be accustomed to using a bug tracker.  I usually spend a certain amount of time at the beginning of a project explaining the functions of our bug tracker to new freelancers.  Bug trackers usually have help documentation but if yours does not provide documentation, it is helpful to have usage instructions that can be accessed off/on site.  Also, just because the bug tracker has been explained does not mean that it is being used.  If your bug tracker does not provide instant notification when a bug/change has been posted, it is the producer’s responsibility to verbalize that a new issues has been posted. And do not feel awkward saying “check the bug tracker” multiple times, sometimes this job is like herding cats!

Freelancers provide new opinions and experiences to project development.  We frequently include freelancers in design meetings and are better for it.  Freelancers wind up getting interesting perspectives and skills from the diversity of the projects they work on.   Those who are forward thinking with their problem solving display hidden skills that I might not have known about, which could lead to further work down the line.  Familiarity with a freelancer’s skill set circles back to trusting your team.  The more comfortable I am with a freelancer’s abilities, the more I am going to champion their employment.

I couldn’t find where Nickelodeon was selling the game but, they should be at some point. There is a lot of game that is not demoed in the web version including three side-scroller levels.

I think the game turned out pretty good. We don’t normally make games for such a young audience so, it was an experience! Hopefully some little kid enjoys it.

Pitfall won the award for the Best Spectacle! The trophy and medal are proudly displayed at the office of Tiny Mantis. So, thanks to everyone who came out to play at this year’s Come Out & Play event!

We’ve also been hard at work on a Dora the Explorer title with Black Hammer Productions–almost done! Our Adult Swim project is also progressing along. We have more projects in the pipeline including an original title for the iPhone. Once our Dora title ships and we get some free time, we’ll write up something about our experience in developing a title specifically aimed at kids.

We are very excited about our iPhone game! We are working with GamePro Labs under a sister brand on this game. It’s going to be awesome.

NYCGameIndustry.com has a feature article about the need for tax breaks and government initiatives to grow the game industry in New York City much like what Boston and Austin have done. The piece mentions Tiny Mantis Entertainment and Stephen Bronner, the author, had conducted an interview with our CEO, Nik Mikros, for it.

Other interviewees include Wade Tinney of Large Animal Games, Jessica Rovello of Arkadium, Eric Zimmerman of Gamelab, Nick Fortugno of Rebel Monkey, John Mikros–brother of Nik Mikros–at Blizzard Entertainment, and others.

The article brings up good points for the usefulness of tax breaks to lessen the burden of doing business in NYC. The game industry is growing every year and there is no reason why NY cannot benefit from the growth of the industry. With the collapse of the financial industry, new industries will fill the void.

The creativity of New Yorkers also can be a big help with employee selection. It’s “the best in the world,” said Rovello. “It’s such a hub for all things creative, which is great for us. There’s an energy here that can’t be replicated anywhere else. It’s a tough city, but it’s the best city in the world.”

NY certainly has a unique advantage when it comes to creativity. Artists flock here from all over the country. We have a perspective that can lead to more interesting game ideas that can expand the industry further.

The NYC game industry is growing slowly and this article brings up good points that shed the light on the reality of the industry in the Big Apple. Read it!

I often wonder, is Web 2.0  just plain evil?  Have we taken it all too far?  We are generating content at an exponential pace.   Is our destiny to replace cinema with home movies of kittens?

Yet, sometimes I feel like I’m watching the same movies and playing the same games over and over like one of those unfortunate characters in a Moebius strip.  But then brilliance shines through and I discover something really unique.  Something that makes me remember why I do this, it makes me want to work harder, to do something new, something awesome.

So as it turns out, I’m an optimist after all… who knew?  So I’m headed for GDC.  Time to recharge the batteries, time to see what my fellow developers are working on.  Time to be inspired… I hope!  Of course I’m looking forward to the parties but I’m also looking forward to sitting in on many of the game design sessions and panels.  I’ll try to give reports while I’m there, but I can’t promise they’ll be coherent.

While having lunch in the Slope, a friend  introduced my wife and me to some friends,  a couple with children.  Upon finding out what I do for a living, the wife’s face turned white as she told me that I was “The Enemy”.  Apparently, it was a constant battle to keep her kids from playing video games.  I did my best to exasperate this lady (why is it always a lady?) All the while, I had to endure listening to her 10 year old boy whine and complain about how he wanted a Game Boy, poor thing didn’t realize DS had been out for years.

Another time, I got a similar dressing down from some lady at a lesbian party in the Slope.  This one claimed that she loved video games, translation, she played Centipede back in the day.  Nonetheless, according to this woman those old games were OK.  However, these new games, they’re BAAAAAAD. She was making the same old argument about how  games are more “realistic” and therefore had some evil magical power over the minds of our zombie like children.

Hell, I even get it from the kids in this crazy neighborhood.  One child told me that she goes to her friend’s house to play Wii but that she treats it like a “book” and then kept telling me how much she loved books. Guess what? I love books too! yay! reading is awesome…  this kid had been made to feel so guilty about playing Nintendogs or whatever  for an hour that she felt the overwhelming desire to cover it up with some nonsense that she felt would appease a grown up, which she sadly mistook me for.

The prejudice even invades the industry internally.  When making games for big media giants, like Nickelodeon or Cartoon Network or even Adult Swim, there is a double standard.  You can say and do things on TV that just will not pass in a game funded by the same organization.  We are self hating that way, or maybe its just our lawyers.

My students play a lot of games, they’ve literally killed millions of monsters, enemy soldiers, gangsters and bosses in their short but ludic lives.  To the best of my knowledge none of them would hurt a fly. I recently asked one of my students what his favorite game was.  He said it was Call of Duty because it was “so realistic”.  I then asked him if he ever felt guilty about killing people in the game.  He didn’t really know how to respond to the question it seemed so preposterous. I asked him how it compared to watching men die in Saving Private Ryan.  He said the movie made him cry.  Though it was difficult for him to express, he intrinsically understood that the digital actors he was killing in Call of Duty represented tokens in a game system, where as the real life actors in Saving Private Ryan were representing actual people, with actual lives even if the characters were fictional.

The problem lies in the observer.  Parents and other do-gooders see what their kids are playing as observers, or worse yet described to them by the mass media.  They  judge the experience from what Nick Fortugno recently called an Apollonian perspective.  On the other hand, the player views the game from the inside, what Nick referred to as the Dionysian perspective.  The terms come from The Birth of Tragedy by Nietzche and to summarize Apollonian art is the kind you experience as an observer like going to the ballet, where Dionysian art is the kind you experience as a participant like dancing drunk.  To the dancer it’s a little piece of heaven. To the observer who’s never had the joy of dancing drunk,  it’s obscene and should be banned.

I’m not saying games aren’t powerful, and I’m not saying games can’t make you feel.  They can make you feel a lot of things, fear, excitement, a sense of adventure, mastery, accomplishment, these feelings games do well.  Love, regret, sorrow, not so much.  There’s reasons for that, I don’t ever recall crying when I captured someone’s queen in chess, didn’t feel sorry for her one bit.  As a game player I understand that characters in a video game, no matter how “realistic”  are just fancier versions of that queen.  Are there exceptions? Sure, Shadow of the Colossus will make you feel for the giants, as you try to save your dead lover at their expense.  The game achieves this by breaking all the game design rules.

So, do I think 10 year olds should be playing M rated games, probably not.  Do I think 10 year olds want to play an M rated game… probably not.  I also think they probably would rather read Harry Potter than they would Lolita.  Do we actually need to regulate what is already a pretty internally regulated industry? of course not.  Does it make sense that stuff that would pass muster on prime time TV gets the dreaded M rating? of course not. Does it makes parents feel warm and fuzzy when lawmakers “do something about it”? Does it win votes?  You betcha.  Does all this nonsense bother me? No.  In the long run, it makes no difference, the demographics bear that out.  The next generation of parents will be a million times more savvy about games than this one, because they will have grown up on games.  A generation of drunken dancers… sounds great! I can’t wait!