This week was the final week of talks, and this week was from Jade who has worked at Hogwarts Legacy, UNO and Lego Horizons Adventure. She talked about the role of a Producer and what they do for a game project, she talked about things to learn in the context of professional game development.
Firstly, Jade talked about the Producer role, which she says is mainly about overseeing the overall game development cycle, keeping time, planning out tasks, communication, a Line of Defense and also being a Source of Truth. This is an interesting pathway thats fairly different than what I want to go into the industry for, which is a programming job. It makes you the captain of the ship when it comes to the games production and tasks you with making sure everyone else on the team is on track and doing what they need to be doing. Personally, I would prefer to stick with looking for a programming role but it is an obviously important role in the game development cycle.
University vs Games Industry
She also talked about the ways that the way game production is handled in University compares to the way the industry handles it, including communication, meeting deadlines, understanding your peers, being accountable and teamwork.
Industry Software
Finally, she talked about the types of software that the industry uses. She specificially mentioned Jira and Trello as a particular piece of software to learn. I have used Trello before in the context of game jams, however I have not used Jira before. I could potentially try to use Trello either for my final project or in the context of a game jam, the latter would be a lower-pressure environment in which to learn the software.