Production 101 - Start Here
A plain-English guide to game production for the curious and the early-career
Game Production Alchemist › Production 101
What game production actually is, without the jargon
Who this series is written for and what you can expect
Why the producer role is harder to explain than most jobs in a studio
How to get the most out of the posts ahead
There is a running joke in game studios that nobody really knows what the producer does. They’re in every meeting. They send a lot of emails. They track things in spreadsheets. But ask someone on the art team or in engineering to describe what a producer actually contributes, and you’ll often get a shrug.
That’s not laziness on the part of the people being asked. It’s a genuine ambiguity that sits at the centre of the profession. Production is a coordination and oversight discipline, which means its outputs are often invisible. When it works well, things just happen. When it goes wrong, everything grinds.
This series is my attempt to fix that ambiguity, one post at a time.
The first ten Production 101 posts have been reworked. Several were among the first things I published here. It showed. Not any more.
Who this is for
Production 101 is written for two kinds of people.
The first is someone outside production who works with producers daily; an artist, a designer, a developer, or a QA tester who wants to understand what’s actually going on when the producer is asking for updates or reshuffling the backlog. Understanding the logic behind production decisions tends to make the whole studio run better.
The second is someone considering a move into production. Maybe you’re already in a studio and you’ve noticed you spend half your time helping people get unblocked. Maybe you’re coming from outside the industry entirely and you’ve read that producers are needed everywhere. Either way, you want to know what the job actually looks like before you commit.
This series won’t talk down to either group. I assume you’re intelligent and curious. I don’t assume you’ve shipped a title or run a sprint before.
What you’ll find here
Each post in this series covers one concept, one tool, or one skill. Some will be definitional: what is a milestone, what does a risk register actually do. Others will be practical: how to run a standup that people don’t resent, how to write a status update that gets read.
I’ll use real examples where I can. I’ve been working in game production for thirty years, across mobile, F2P, LiveOps, and co-development. A lot of what I’ll share comes from things I got wrong before I got them right.
The posts are designed to stand alone. You don’t need to read them in order, though the early ones do lay groundwork that later posts build on. Think of it less as a course and more as a reference shelf you can dip into when a specific problem comes up.
A note on scope
Game production covers a lot of ground. Different studios organise it differently. A producer at a forty-person indie works nothing like a producer managing external vendors for a AAA publisher. I’ll try to flag where practices vary, and I’ll be clear when I’m describing how I’ve personally done things rather than claiming there’s one universal right answer.
Production is a practical discipline. The theory only matters insofar as it helps you make better decisions in the room, on the call, or in the document. That’s the lens I’ll apply throughout.
The first Production 101 post covers what a producer actually does on a day-to-day basis. Start there if you’re new to the role. Or browse the archive and find whatever’s most useful to you right now.
Production 101 Archive:
#1 - What Does a Producer Do? - ask ten producers what they do and you’ll get ten different answers. This post explains why that’s accurate and what the role actually covers across studio types, team sizes, and phases of production.
#2 - Producer Job Roles Within a Studio - the job titles vary by studio but the career ladder has a consistent shape. This post maps every level from associate producer to head of production, what each one involves, and what the step up actually requires.
#3 Part 1 - Role of an Internal Producer - the internal producer sits inside the team and owns the delivery. Part 1 covers the strategic and organisational side: project planning, reporting up, and managing the relationship between the team and leadership.
#3 Part 2 - Role of an Internal Producer - the tools are the easy part. Part 2 focuses on the harder side of the role: the social capital, emotional intelligence, and daily trade-offs that determine whether a producer can actually move things forward.
#4 - Role of an External Producer - the external producer sits at the publisher, not the studio. This post covers what that means in practice: managing a relationship with a team you don’t directly control, across milestones, contracts, and often different time zones.
#5 Part 1 - Free-to-Play Game Economics - free-to-play is the dominant model in mobile and a growing force on PC and console. Part 1 covers the foundations: what the model is, how it differs from premium, and what accessibility-driven monetisation means for every production decision you make.
#5 Part 2 - Free-to-Play Metrics - LTV is the number that drives most strategic decisions in F2P. Part 2 explains how lifetime value is calculated, why it matters more than any other single metric, and how it connects to the decisions producers make about what to build and when.
#5 Part 3 - Free-to-Play Ethics - some engagement patterns are designed to keep players returning and spending. Part 3 examines the core loop, the ethics of compulsion mechanics, and why producers need to understand what they’re building, not just how it performs.
#6 - New to Game Production? Start Here - the tools and frameworks can be learned quickly. The interpersonal competencies that separate effective producers from organised ones take years. This post covers the traits that actually determine whether you’ll succeed in the role.
#7 - What Does a Product Manager Do? - the product manager role has grown significantly as live service games became the dominant commercial model. This post covers what a game PM actually owns, how it overlaps with production in some studios, and how to tell which path is right for you.
#8 - Legal Documents Every Producer Should Know - producers manage contracts every day without always knowing what they’re signing. This post covers the documents that come up most often, what the key clauses actually mean, and when to escalate to legal counsel rather than figuring it out yourself.
#9 - Why Status Reports Matter - most producers write status reports nobody reads. This post covers why that happens and how to fix it.
#10 - Producers’ Impact on Product Roadmaps - most people treat a roadmap as a schedule. It isn’t, and that mistake has consequences. This post covers what a roadmap actually is, who reads it, and what the producer’s specific contribution to building and maintaining one looks like.
#11 - Roadmaps in Live Service - a live service roadmap is never finished. This post covers the specific discipline of keeping a roadmap honest when the game is already live, the hard obligations that calendar-fixed events create, and what player-facing roadmaps should and should not contain.
#12 - Agile for Game Producers - most studios say they do Scrum. Most of them don’t, and that’s probably fine. This post explains what Agile actually is, where Scrum-shaped processes break down in game development, and what to run instead.
#13 - How to Build a Milestone Schedule - a schedule is a theory. This post covers how to build one that breaks gracefully: working backwards from the ship date, finding the critical path, placing contingency where it will not disappear, and communicating it to the audiences who each need something different from the same document.
#14 - Scope Management and the Art of Cutting - features never get cut when they should. They get cut when there is no other choice. This post covers why scope management is a continuous discipline rather than a kickoff decision, and how to run it before the crisis rather than during it.
Upcoming topics:
7-Jun-26
#15 - Understanding Publishing Platforms - almost everything you need for cert submission is public documentation. The problem is finding out about it after the launch window has moved. This post covers the compliance frameworks, submission timelines, and store requirements for the six platforms producers encounter most.
#16 - QA’s Role in the Production Process - most studios run QC and call it QA. The distinction matters because the timing is completely different. This post covers what QA actually is, why involving it before development starts changes what you find, and how to read bug data as a production signal rather than just a test result.
#17 - Pre-Production: What the Producer Does Before Production Starts - pre-production is where most games are won or lost, and where producers are most likely to be absent or ineffective. This post covers what the role looks like in the phase before the schedule is committed, where the work is less legible than a task board but the decisions are the most consequential.
#18 - Running Meetings That Are Not a Waste of Time - a ten-person standup that runs fifteen minutes costs two and a half hours of aggregate team time, every day. This post covers how to audit your meeting load, what should travel in writing instead, and what actually requires real-time presence.
14-Jun-26-26
#19 - Risk Management Beyond the Status Report - the risk section of a status report records that you knew something could go wrong. It does not manage the risk. This post covers the difference between a risk and an issue, how to run a register that is actually useful, and why risk management only works when the people doing the work believe their input matters.
#20 - Managing Up: Working With Studio Leadership - the decisions that affect your project most are made above you, by people using information you provided. This post covers how to shape those decisions through clarity and timing, what different stakeholders actually need from your reports, and how to build trust with leadership rather than erode it.
#21 - Live Ops Cadence: Building Events and Handing Them Over - the producer builds the event infrastructure. The product manager runs it. This post covers that division of labour, what a finished event kit actually looks like, how timeline compression works in live ops, and what the post-mortem should examine when an event is done.
#22 - How Producers Work With Data - producers who only read dashboards are flying by instruments when they should be looking out the window. This post covers what producers actually need from data, why the right metrics depend entirely on your business model, and how to commission analysis you can act on.
21-Jun-26
#23 - Onboarding to a Project Already in Flight - the instinct when you join mid-project is to add value quickly. The most valuable thing you can do in the first two weeks is not add anything. This post covers how to read a project’s actual condition, surface the informal knowledge layer, and close the trust deficit without breaking what is already working.
#24 - Getting Your First Producer Role - the standard advice for breaking into game production is to find an entry-level role. The problem is most studios do not have them. This post covers the paths that actually get people hired, what hiring managers are really screening for, and what the first year in the role requires.
#25 - Working With a Creative Director - the producer and the creative director want the same outcome and get there by completely different routes. This post covers who owns what, where friction typically lives, and how to present a delivery constraint without making a creative decision that belongs to someone else.
#26 - Producing Across Time Zones - remote production is not in-person production with a longer commute. The gaps are different. This post covers what distributed teams lose by default, how to build deliberately the things that used to happen by accident, and why async-first is a discipline, not a preference.
28-Jun-26
#27 - Before You Touch an AI Agent, Learn What It Actually Is - most people treat AI agent harnesses like chatbots. They are not chatbots. This post covers the mental models that actually matter: what context windows are and why they degrade, what the prompt-as-spec relationship means, and what producers are well-positioned to do with these tools.
I came here off the "Read More" link at the bottom of the article which referenced "the other long-winded tomes of the Game Production Alchemist". I was hoping for a little more insight into the Alchemist himself, his history, his writing career, his game production career, etc. Instead, I see this series. Hmm...