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RIT Video Game Production Podcast Transcript.Pdf NARRATOR: So, you like playing video games so much that you think you’d like a career in making them. But what does a video game producer do? In this episode of Intersections: The RIT Podcast, John Blau, a fourth-year game design and development major, talks with John Veneron, digital games hub associate at RIT’s MAGIC Spell Studios, about their experiences in video game production and how RIT’s MAGIC Center is helping student developers publish their work. JOHN BLAU: I didn’t know that I wanted to go into game production. I didn’t even know that I wanted to go into games when I was applying to universities. I came in to RIT as a computer science major. I found very Quickly that computer science was a lot of fun for me. It provided a lot of really interesting ways to solve problems. And it also gave me a really strong technical background – at least that one semester that I actually spent in it. But I found that I wanted to interact with people a lot more. I found that I liked exposing the human side of computers and the human side of our digital media a lot more. And I thought that the games program was a way for me to start expressing those things. So I spent one semester in computer science and then I was like, okay. I went to a lot of talks, actually. I saw there were a lot of people from Amazon Game Studios that came in. There were some people from Epic who came in. And I tried to listen to a lot of what they had to say. And I felt that that kind of career path was a lot more interesting to me in terms of what I wanted to do and what I wanted to align with. And I wanted to be involved with a lot of that cutting-edge technology that, especially through high school and the rest of my life, I had been watching and consuming. I think that was the moment when I was able to talk to some of those people and ask them for some feedback. They took a look at my portfolio – that sort of stuff. That was a moment when I sort of realized, oh these are the humans behind the screen. And that I could actually go out and try to do some of this cool stuff. JOHN VENERON: Yeah. There are real humans that make games. JOHN BLAU: Right. JOHN VENERON: So why production? What was the moment you were like, “I want to be a producer?” JOHN BLAU: Weirdly enough, that sort of happened before I realized I was going to go into games. I had played a bunch of games through high school. I had kept in touch with games and media and all that sort of stuff. And there was an Extra Credits episode I was watching. I think it was in tenth grade. JOHN VENERON: Am I supposed to know what Extra Credits is? JOHN BLAU: Oh. Extra Credits is an online YouTube series. They do a lot of education and also they do a lot of work saying, oh here’s in the industry, right, let’s do some game theory stuff. Here’s what a producer does, here’s what a game designer does, here’s what a technical artist does. For me, and a lot of people I’ve met in the major, that was our first exposure to the idea that people make games instead of them just coming down from nowhere. So, they had this episode on designers and different roles in the games industry. As I remember it, there was this three-minute section dedicated to producers. Basically saying, these people make the entire team function, basically. They pitched them as interdisciplinary collaborators and people who would do problem solving across team boundaries. I thought that was a really compelling and interesting way of approaching a problem. JOHN VENERON: Sort of taking a more global view of how time gets spent on a project as opposed to being one of the people implementing things. JOHN BLAU: Right. It wasn’t so much about, I’m producing a result by the end of the day. It was a little bit more intangible. It had more to do with making people feel good and making people feel more productive. Those were things that I latched on to a lot. So, when I had the opportunity to swap into game design, I at least had that background in my mind and luckily enough found some mentors in the program that encouraged me to explore some of those ideas. JOHN VENERON: While you were explaining that, I was thinking back to my college experience. I ended up getting a degree in English and I got a job in QA (quality assurance) at a company called Harmonix right out of college. My first project was Rock Band for Xbox 360 and PlayStation 3, testing the game and getting it launched. I remember at the time thinking, what do I do with an English degree in game development? So, I had a plan to be a community manager and moved over to the community management department, one of the least glamorous jobs you can think of. But I wanted to be closer to game development again. So, I’ve been in production since 2009 and I’ve led production on games like Dance Central Spotlight and Rock Band 4 and a game called Hob at Runic Games. But yeah, you were talking a lot about your experience having exposure to talks, talking about what production is and what the roles are at game development studios and things like that. Back in 2006 or 2007, there weren’t the resources there are now. And there wasn’t the awareness in programs about even what game development is. It’s crazy to me how much more prepared you can be. Even though there isn’t a production track at RIT, the wealth of resources there are to understand what game development is and be trained in what game development is is really impressive. JOHN BLAU: Absolutely. That’s one of the reasons I chose RIT in the first place because I felt it had a lot more reach than a lot of other universities that I was looking at. And it had a lot more cross collaboration between disciplines. So, I was able to explore things like production and things like design a lot more in depth, especially in my first few moments, because all that interdisciplinary stuff is happening. So, I’m glad that I made that choice. JOHN VENERON: What has your experience been like working on projects here? I know I’ve worked with you in a sort of production capacity, but you’ve also led some projects. What’s the been like leading projects and actually working in games? JOHN BLAU: What I really like about this major and this sort of track is that it’s a lot of self-starting. You said your experience was that you were on a project and you learned that way. Here, for us, it’s a lot of, we need to start that project. We’re the ones who kickstart that motion. So the first project that I worked as a producer on – it’s a little card game called Guesstalt, and it was made in about seven days. I was like, sure I’ll make sure that the timeline is okay for that, I’ll make sure we hold the meetings. That was my first moment of being a producer. And as small as that little experience was, it sort of encompassed a lot of what producers do. It’s making sure that meetings are being held, it’s making sure that everyone is clear what the vision is. So after that, the next semester, this is now the first semester of my sophomore year, I took part in a game jam that IGM was hosting and started a little game called Metrognome. It’s a rhythm game for mobile devices that’s centered around teaching new musicians how to keep a beat. We made that game in a weekend. I said, “Hey, I want to try out some of this production stuff on this game.” And I also tried to work with another coder on the team, his name was Matthew Barry, and also an artist and another coder for the game whose name is Barrington Campbell. The three of us went over to MAGIC Spell Studios, and they accepted that game to go to that year’s Game Developers Conference out in San Francisco. So, we had about four months in between from when we started Metrognome to a very hard deadline of March of the next year, about four months, to make that game. I was the producer through that, so I made sure that we could bring on other artists as we needed them. I made sure that the music production, the custom tracks for that game, were all getting made by composers and could all be thrown into the game. From there, the next year we went on to make a game that you know very, very well called Elderberry Trails. I, again, was the producer on that title. Again, we worked through MAGIC, which is where you started getting involved as a mentor and somebody who was able to give me a few more production tips from your many, many years in industry.
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