Inside the Dev’s Studio: Post Mortems

This is going to be the first in a series of articles that give a peek inside the walls of a game developer.

With the game pressed and waiting for January 26th this week has been about reflection and planning. During this time it is customary to sit at an email and spew hate for the things you didn’t like while working on this project, ignoring everything that was great about what you did. Some would call this a ‘post mortem’ – a dissection of how the project faired in terms of production. I call this unproductive bullshit.

Listen, the point of a post-mortem is to have a retrospective look at how the project faired: We are a young industry and we’re still making all this shit up, so it’s important to aggressively criticize the methods taken to make the game. Writing down emails of ‘and then this person did this and I hated it’ accomplish nothing. Sitting in a room with 30 people and having a shouting match about what you hated accomplish nothing. You need to break it down to what worked and what didn’t. But also one more thing that many studios forget: you have to create action items for everything on the list; you need to ensure that every complaint, every kudo has task to fix it or continue it.

But it doesn’t stop there: you need a production or management staff that will use those action items as tasks for the next project. In 2005 for Full Auto, the art team filed me (as Art Lead) emails that were broken down into such categories and combined and filtered them into what ended up being a 55 page document with action items for everything. This was then sent to the managers of the studio, where it sat and wasn’t looked at. Which then created more emails of hate. The Art Team did everything right and all the work and effort that was put into it was put out with the heel of a boot.

BioWare, and more specifically the Mass Effect team’s preferred method, is to gather everyone in a room for half a day and with a Producer at the helm gather the feedback. (I should note here for others in the gaming industry that we have the best producers in the world here. Your preconceived ideas of what a producer is is completely shattered at BioWare). Usually doing this causes chaos and a Kill Cloud of negative energy gathers in the room. People start talking over each other, others become quiet and irritable, even worse is when some people’s comments are negated because someone has a louder voice. But kudos to our production team for finding a way to resolve this. Yesterday our Project Manager Corey Andruko split the giant whiteboard into 4 sections of development: tools, workflow, systems and communication (usually the whipping boy of these meetings) and like a conductor, a stinking and sometimes unworking marker his baton, brought in the the ‘What went rights’ with the ‘What went wrong’. Everyone had a chance to speak and every item was boiled down to the issue at hand, sometimes being combined with other issues into a larger task. Even though we were trapped in that dark meeting room for the entire morning, we all left feeling that someone had listened to our thoughts.
And here’s the thing…every item brought up were things that would make the next project better. There was nothing disastrous brought up and that really showed how well this project went. We were all sitting in that room wanting things to change, or stay the same, to make the next project better.

So now the poor production team has to collate not only our feedback but the feedback of every department and discipline on Mass Effect 2. And this is where we’ll see if our minimal effort and productions hard work goes further and is rolled out as tasks for the next project. Seeing as how this process and a post-mortem of Mass Effect 1 created Mass Effect 2, a game and process we’re all immensely pleased and proud of, I’m optimistic.

But for those of you entering the industry or working at a studio that doesn’t have any or a productive post-mortem process, here’s my advice. It is critical that we do this: we are a young industry with gangly arms trying to get the respect of the adults. If we don’t seriously criticize ourselves and work to fix those issues that arose; if we don’t research how other studios resolved those problems and envelop the successful studios processes we will not only not get that respect we’re asking for, we will never mature as an industry. So gather your people after a project, ask them what went right, ask them what went wrong and take those tasks to heart as to how your next project will work. Don’t make this a shouting match of hate because that will do nothing but piss people off.