What I've been doing as Producer for Danchi Days
Working on Danchi Days on and off for the past 6 months or so has been a fun (and challenging) experience. We’ve hit all paces of development, from pretty loose brainstorming and being a weekend project, to full-on weeks of to-do-list-filled prep for public showings and announcements. Now, things are settling into a more steady part-time development for the team.
I’m used to working in a 2-person team on Analgesic’s other games (Angeline Era, Anodyne, etc), but with Danchi Days I’m working in a team of 3 with mogumu (art) and sandy powder (writing/co-design).
Generally I’ve taken more of the producer roles in my usual collaborations with Marina as Analgesic - this includes tasks like deciding release dates, milestones, schedules, etc. I don’t generally feel like much of a producer, though. In contrast, working on Danchi Days requires me to be a producer a bit more - in particular, as a mentor/coach, and as a project manager.
Producer as Project Manager
For all sorts of reasons, it’s not a great idea to try to make a long game as your first game, and actually I was apprehensive about this at first, back in 2023 when brainstorming DD with sandy powder! Would it be possible?
For newcomers, without the intuition for where you are in the game’s development, it’ll be hard to know things like, how load-bearing is a particular design element? Are the game’s fundamentals solid enough to begin production?
Even such questions are difficult for me now. But actually if the team has one person with experience I think it’s OK to make a large game with otherwise inexperienced devs.
I think what a producer needs to do when working with newcomers, is to be able to define what the focus of development should be at any given time... kind of like being a rough compass or map.
Early on, they should be encouraging brainstorming and research. A bit later, they should focus on really trying to discuss and develop ideas that can be prototypable. It includes discussing and considering different types of story plots and storytelling and considering what kind of scope would be needed to pull it off. The producer has to be able to think ahead as to the implications of art styles, asset requirements, etc. The producer should also be familiar with how brainstorming works and how it requires cycles of rest, thinking, discussion.
Later on, the producer needs to be aware of where the team is in the project, and whether that’s on track with the financial (and mental stamina) realities of the team. I feel like it’s easier (but usually not better!) to assign more work than less, but more work is also more likely to tire everyone out if it goes on too long.
Luckily, though, newcomers to game development can adjust pretty fast if their roles aren’t too many steps away from their day-to-day hobbies or work. sandy writes and reads a lot for her job, mogumu is a professional illustrator. The project manager’s job is being able to communicate how those skills are used to create finished assets or drafts for the game.
What’s great is that, of course, everyone learns! I think I have needed less involvement as a project manager in the past few months compared to early on. Everyone feels more able to figure out how realistic certain tasks seem, and know how to bring them to a level where they’re mostly or completely ready for being implemented into the game.
This brings me to my next point, which is that being a producer with newcomers sometimes feels like being a mentor.
Mentor
Maintaining Motivation
I think the mentor’s role here is to make it clear that the goal of a finished game IS a bit scary and far away, but that it’s very much break-down-able into bite-sized pieces. And moreover, that it’s normal for motivation to waver throughout the project. Kind of like completing something long term like a college degree, it helps to have the game feel like it has different milestones…bringing different aspects to life, showing it in public, sending it to players.
But assuming the team gets along with each other, I think most of the motivation will naturally happen if the game is progressing at a decent pace. It feels easier to maintain motivation in a project of 3 rather than 2, actually - because more people are reacting and more people are making things, it kind of averages out everyone’s emotional ups and downs.
Something that’s come to mind is that it’s important to get public response earlier rather than later, as it’s motivating to see people’s reactions. I know this is uncommon practice in the world of secretive corporate-style game development, but if we’re working as independent artists I think we should foster the art-artist-audience relationship earlier on. Art-making only starts to feel “real” when other humans start to react to it!
How we approached this with Danchi Days was to post sketches very early, reveal the game and some characters early, then proceed to doing a ‘beautiful corner’ (where the game looks playable to an onlooker, but it really isn’t lol) for a reveal trailer, then finally playable and testable demos. I think it was useful and motivating for the team to see these progressive states of the game coming to life!
(In this trailer there wasn’t really much playable… game… lol.)
Additionally, I think an important skill is normalizing the experience of getting public response, whether it be negative or positive. By getting used to them in smaller ways (e.g. dealing with rejections, or negative feedback) and learning how to process these experiences, it makes development smoother. And I think it will prepare everyone more for the emotional experience of release.
Something interesting I’ve noticed here is that sandy (as co-designer) is more quick-footed for getting player feedback. I think this is something I want to do more of: I think as I got more experienced in game development there’s a tendency to be a bit less proactive for feedback, seeking it less frequently. But there’s just certain things that feel hard to nail down without making a couple dozen other people play.
Mentoring
With sandy, she comes from a writing-heavy background, however, that does take some adjustment in the context of a game. It helped to play through some other games and discuss them, especially from the angle of narrative, and I think it’s helped for me to provide the structure and skeleton of how a game story comes about, being able to guide where she should be brainstorming or drafting, and thinking about the challenges that come with fitting in linear stories with open-ended game design. To this end, it’s been very helpful to have common talking points for narrative-based media and research the same works together.
With mogumu, they are an illustrator by trade, but since pixel art was new for them I asked Marina for some tips and combined that with some things I’ve picked up on visual arts/games over the years. I prepared a handful of references and quick breakdowns of effective pixel art styles, color palettes, etc. The transition from digital illustration to pixel art has gone really smoothly! I think this is attributable to mogumu’s ability as an artist as well as also just sharing the team’s love for GBA/GBC pixel art games. Like with Anodyne 1, I think the choices to keep Danchi Days low resolution has been really useful in providing certain constraints for artistic decisions like character sizes, pixel density, shapes, etc.
With sandy powder I was also a game design mentor. I think this is potentially the trickiest when it comes to working with a newcomer who doesn’t have design experience. However, if someone wants to be involved in a game’s creative direction or story it’s highly likely they will be needing to think about game design.
I’ll just lay out what I felt was advantageous with our mentor relationship here.
We have a lot of common talking points in terms of games. For example, the main game inspiration for DD, Uki-Uki Carnival. Or games like Wario Ware, Phoenix Wright, Pokemon. It’s important, because I can talk about concrete examples from these games but through an analytical lens.
Her day job involves work that has abstract similarities to game design, thus, she’s pretty tuned in to how people react to things and learn
She’s already self-driven with games and design research
With that in mind, we spent a few weeks (in 2023! Way before starting prototyping on DD) just playing through games and analyzing them through a small analytical framework I came up with. I think this then helped with her being able to view games more analytically (what is the game trying to achieve or communicate?), or, being able to phrase her criticisms more rigorously.
Of course, even with all that it’s still necessary that I’m leading the design role, since there’s ‘feel’ things like game-wide pacing, how to approach prototyping, whether something seems feasible, how to convert certain ideas into something workable for the game, etc, that can’t really be taught quickly. (Or at all? Idk. I was caught off-guard the other day by how hard it is to explain why Danchi Days fixed screen size is necessary for the game. There’s almost too many reasons!)
There’s also the intuition for when an aspect of the game really needs other designers’s eyes or feedback - knowing how to ask for that and also how to incorporate suggestions. I think almost every game has a number of ‘design ruts’ that are just inescapable without asking for help.
But those above 3 points have been a good basis to the extent that we can work through and understand game design problems together! As long as the other person can act as a co-designer or second opinion, it should probably work out.
Lastly… I think anyone acting as a design mentor should be willing to play a wide variety of games and really be able to dig into a specific category of games if needed. It can be tempting to just rely on games you already know, but I think developing any game competently requires you to be playing relevant games all throughout development. Not necessarily at a high intensity all the time, but enough that you’re able to keep new reference points in your head. And you should be comfortable with playing older games :) ha ha.