Welcome back to another instalment of What I Do, Aftermath's semi-regular look at just what it is, exactly, that individuals do for a living in the video game industry.
Today's interview is with Jim Unwin, who has worked everywhere from Media Molecule (LittleBigPlanet) to PlayStation, and who used to be a UX designer, but who is now an executive producer, a role that perhaps more than any other will have people asking "Uh, so what does that mean, exactly?" Which is exactly why we're talking!
Luke Plunkett: Hey man! Can you tell us about yourself? You as Jim, not your job, we can get to that in a second.
Jim Unwin: Hello Aftermath. My name is Jim Unwin, I’m 46, 180cm tall, and have lived most of my life in the UK. I have always compulsively made stuff, especially drawings, and have always been fascinated by video games.
Some of my earliest gaming memories include my friend Dan Barrett and I playing Elite on his BBC Micro, and Secret Of Mana on the SNES with my brother. In both games there was a sense that, even if you weren’t holding the controller, you could still experience these worlds unfolding around you.
These older games, built with cruder tech, left more room between their pixels for your imagination. As a kid I absolutely thrived in those spaces.
LP: You used to work in UX, right? How was that, and how did it lead to becoming an executive producer?
JU: I’m an Executive Producer for a studio called Glowmade. We are currently finishing up a game called King Of Meat.
While I originally joined the studio as a UX designer, my role has changed as Glowmade has grown. King Of Meat was the studio’s third game, and has been a bit of a rocket. I started as half of a two-man team (alongside coder Sam Hayhurst) working on the prototype. Now there are about a hundred people working on the game. I guess as the game has grown I've been lifted by that tide. There wasn’t much of a career plan beyond “make a cool game”. To be honest that is still my goal.
Before Glowmade… I’m unavoidably old, I’ve been in or around the industry for a long time. I’m slowly coming to terms with being a “grey beard” developer, though I am not at all happy about it. The first published game I worked on was Jaguar XJ220 for the Sega MegaCD (1993!). Since then I’ve also worked on Tomb Raider 2, LittleBigPlanet, and the Sony Playstation 4. In between I’ve done a bunch of other stuff, including web design and illustration.
I think UX, which deals a lot with stakeholders, metrics, etc, leads fairly naturally into product or management type roles.
LP: OK, so in as much detail as you can spare...what does an executive producer actually do on a regular basis?
JU: At a high level, as Executive Producer, I'm trying to deliver a game that is a success. Of course success can mean different things to different people in the team, things like: Everyone at Glowmade can pay rent and feed their kids. Players have fun. The game is critically well received. People working on the game are creatively fulfilled. The publisher returns a profit. The list goes on and on and on.
At the end of the day you can't do everything, because that’s impossible, so you have to try and prioritise, and make some decisions. That's where I think Executive Producer comes in. I’m working with everyone else trying to crystallise all these competing ideas of success, make them comparable, prioritise them, and - if needs be - I’m the tie-breaker for any intractable disagreements. Honestly, this is not mega painful at Glowmade; where I’m surrounded by a ton of experience, and a team generally all pulling in the same direction!
Day to day it means a lot of talking. Lots of reading. Lots of digging into issues and ideas. Most weeks I do around 20 hours of calls or meetings. There’s a lot of regular stuff, catching up with directors and leads and producers both in Glowmade and at our publishers, as well as chasing down whatever problem has cropped up this week, or today, or ten minutes ago. I spend a lot of time on Slack. I occasionally have to write some longer form stuff, specifications, briefs for outsourcing, that sort of thing. On top of that I try to play the game daily. Sometimes I’m looking at an issue, sometimes I’m just playing it for fun. It's important to play the game for fun, and experience it as a player. It is very easy to lose yourself in the process and lose sight of the thing you produce at the end.
At the moment, as we're moving into the last stretch of development, there seems to be two main threads I'm dealing with. 1. Really understanding what we have left to do, and when it will be done. 2. Figuring out what we focus on to make the game we have even better. At this point we have a relatively small number of developer tokens left, and each one has to be spent with care. What is actually going to make a difference to the player?
(It is worth noting that an Executive Producer means different things in different organisations. I talk a lot to a peer in Amazon with the same title, and while our goals are widely the same, his day-to-day work is wildly different. So YMMV)
LP: What are you getting out of the job? Creatively, personally, it sounds like a pretty different role to working in UX or illustration!
JU: Quite late in life I have come to realise that I find people fascinating. I love discussing how people are feeling, what they want out of today, what they want out of their lives; then taking these threads and trying to figure out how we can balance with what the game needs, and what the studio needs. You can’t make one person happy at the expense of the wider team/project but the pieces do their best work when they are happy. It’s like a big complicated puzzle in which the pieces move around or change shape, or disappear entirely when you aren’t looking. I think this is a rather strained analogy.
SO ANYWAY. You take the above and you try to make it work, try to tessellate it all together as best you can (but, argh, you know it is never going to be quite perfect). AND THEN, after some time, you realise you’ve made this big wooly homunculus, and it has come to life, and has its own direction and desires, and everyone is dividing their energy between trying to guide it and just holding on. And that is an incredible buzz: Look at this thing we made, look at our gigantic shambling baby! What do you think it will do next?
It’s funny, despite having spent most of my career as an illustrator or artist or graphic designer, these days I make very little, yet I'm more creatively fulfilled than I ever have been.
LP: What about the negatives? What do people not understand about the job, or what do you wish was different?
JU: “Management” is typically used as a pejorative term: that guy has swapped their pencil for a spreadsheet and now only cares about the bottom line. But no one truly creates in isolation, so I wish more people grappled with what it is to make something with other folk. Management is making stuff with other people, it's a creative problem, there is more than one right answer.
You can read more 'What I Do' features, interviewing everyone from composers to lawyers to engine developers, here.
