Gamasutra on a role

Time for another link dump, but this time all of the articles come from Gamasutra. I thereby dedicate this blog posting to the best game developer site around. Here's to you, Gamasutra!

• The CEO of Ubisoft Montreal (my boss) Yannis Mallat was interviewed last week to discuss his vision for the studio and game development in Quebec in general. One point I'd like to reinforce from this article is the quality of the graduates from the Campus Ubisoft program. We have three such graduates on my current project and all of them are performing well above expectations. They have the passionate and drive of "juniors" but hit the ground running from day one. I'll hire from Campus again as soon as I next ramp up.
• This week's 'Ask The Experts' question is 'How to become a Producer'. This isn't the first time I've seen dev sites try to answer this and I generally find they come up short. Practise being a leader, manage a large project, work your way up the food chain -- rinse, wash, repeat. I can't really blame them, though, because it is a difficult subject to sum up in a few hundred words. The one point I often see missing that I have found very important in my job as a producer (perhaps paramount) and seems to be common amongst others in this role is a combination of 'Strength of will' (that is, the ability to push something through to your team that you know to be important) and 'humility' (for example, the ability to recognize your own weaknesses and delegate around them). Additionally I take issue (again, perhaps unique to Ubisoft Montreal) to the claim that becoming a Producer requires a company change because Associate Producers are rarely promoted internally. I'd say nearly half of Ubi Montreal's Producer team were Associates first. It very much depends on the role of the Associate at the company in question, but here they are often Producers in almost every way save title. If Ubi used the 'Co-Producer' title in the credits, many of the Associates here would deserve the rank.
• Finally, Raph Koster has announced the founding of his new company, Areae. Given's Raph's visibility these days I'm sure the 'sphere will be buzzing with speculation regarding just how different from Second Life Areae's flagship title will be. I can't wait to learn more, but I think I'll leave it to David to try and decipher the clues that are, evidently, scattered around the Areae homepage.