Earlier today I reviewed Game Coding Complete, Second Edition, and I remarked that a thorough reading of the book was like having a college course in game production. "Production", though, is a bit of a weasel-word which is very well defined in places (movies being the most obvious example), but it's a word that's name doesn't mesh well with its actual use. The best definition of movie producer that I've ever heard was from a producer himself (I'm not sure if it was Roger Corman, so I won't say with certainty) who said that 90% of a producer's job is over by the time the movie shoots its first frame of film. That means that a producer's job is to do everything that's gotta be done first. He must come up with the idea, find or commission the script, oversee the hiring of the director and actors and camera-people, secure the locations for shooting, and come up with a schedule for the project that'll take all of that into account. That's certainly a Herculean task, especially for a non-trivial movie.

Contrast that with "production" as it's used in the auto industry. If you think of production in the auto industry, you think of chunks of metal moving down conveyor belts to have things bolted and welded to 'em until you get a completed car. There's loads of design and planning that comes into play before a car can be built, but that's considered to be "engineering" and "project management" rather than "production". By the time an automobile's ready for production, the engineering is 90% done and the engineering then consists solely, as in the job of a movie producer, of fixing problems and tuning the bugs introduced in planning so that the plan is capable of producing a viable product, movie or car.

I say this because I'm now reviewing The Game Producer's Handbook, which is also a book about game production that's almost entirely different from Game Coding Complete, Second Edition. While Game Coding Complete, Second Edition covers production in the auto manufacturer's vernacular of getting your hands dirty with the business of coding an actual game, The Game Producer's Handbook covers production like a movie producer --all the stuff that goes before, after, and around the actual code. You won't find a single line of code in this book. The book's got several good "hands on" examples of production, but they're done using MS Excel and Project, not C++.

One thing I've found in my experience with game developers, and it's that they tend to have loads of programming experience but not one scintilla of experience in managing a team or a project. In fact, many consider team and project management skills to be some kind of innate knowledge that doesn't need to be learned and practiced, as opposed to programming which requires plenty of research and practice to be proficient. And that's a load of horse-apples. Project and team management is just as much science as programming, and if you come into lead of a project without any management experience or education, you're just as likely to thrash about as an inexperienced programmer dropped into the middle of a mission-critical project.

And you've got just as low a chance of success, which is why you've gotta read, like it or not.

As with Game Coding Complete, Second Edition, The Game Producer's Handbook is a big chunk of a complete course in game production. Unfortunately, this doesn't mean that the book is a good substitute for such a course. For example, there's no real feedback mechanism in a book that you'd get in a college course. And as a seasoned (although not as seasoned as the author) game developer, I took exception to some of the author's assertions here and there. For example, at one point Mr. Irish stresses the importance of being innovative in your design so that your game will be noticed. That set off the red flags in my head, and I wanted to say "Yeah, but innovation isn't worth a bucket of warm weasel spit if you don't watch the market. In 1997, Obsidian was a very innovative title, but it bombed while a dozen deer-hunting games made all the money that year!". Of course, this is more a deficiency of printed text rather than the author's assertions. There are plenty of examples of innovative titles doing very well, and "innovation versus market" is a great topic for discussion. You can't, unfortunately, have a discussion with a book, so you'll have to approach this text with an open and questioning mind and be prepared to discuss the book's claims (in the gamedev forums, perhaps).

The Game Producer's Handbook is just the ticket if you're a guy with requisite programming experience but without the ability to "pull it all together". If you're a rank amateur, there are a couple of places where the book sets out to do something and doesn't give you enough. A particular example I can cite is the section labeled "What Producers Need to Know about Tools". This section attempts to get non-programmers up to speed on some of the popular tools, but it's just not really worthwhile. It spends a couple of paragraphs each on OpenGL ES, IncrediBuild, Microsoft Visual C++, Visual Assist X, VectorC, XNA, and DirectX. It's an oddly-chosen list of products to cover, and it's certainly not enough to get a non-programmer versed in a good cross-section of programming tools. It would've been better to have a sub-chapter covering a more general overview like programming languages, DirectX vs OpenGL, Visual Studio vs Eclipse, etc.

One other problem I had is that I'm having a rough time finding downloadables for the book. The introduction sends me to http://www.courseptr.com/downloads, for further info, but all I can find there is a sample chapter. The appendix shows several very useful spreadsheets (in exceedingly tiny type) along with project checklists and such, but I can't seem to find a place to get 'em short of typing everything in myself. While I usually find pack-in CD's to be of little worth, it would've been nice to get one with The Game Producer's Handbook.

In any case, The Game Producer's Handbook is an excellent companion volume to Game Coding Complete. Like Complete, The Game Producer's Handbook is written by an industry veteran with enough projects under his belt to impress upon you that he knows what he's doing. It's loaded with many facts and industry insights written from a practical perspective. It fills in many of the gaps, giving you a good definition of what a game producer does and then what it takes to do the job. Any non-trivial non-freeware game project is going to require some kind of producer skills, like it or not. The Game Producer's Handbook is a great start to get there.

So get both books and start reading. You've got a lot of work ahead of you.