It's Better To Be Friends: Marketing "Asks" and the Reality of Game Production

[Music] uh my name is Becca Saltzman um and yeah it's better to be friends marketing ass than the reality of game production uh I am the CEO and co-founder of Fini which is a both a publishing partner or a publisher and also an independent development team so we kind of run both we're kind we're very weird in the industry we've doing it for a while um my partner is Adam Saltzman who is our creative director um he runs our development team um and if you recognize his name um online his name is Adam Atomic so we like old flash games he made cannibal back in the day um and one of our previous titles was Overland and we're based in Grand Rapids Michigan so we're also in a weird part of the world um we make a bunch of games um I mentioned two already Overland and cannibal um we also publish games like tunic I was a teenage EXO colonist CH a colorful tail and Night in the Woods among a lot of others um our studio is

roughly I'm giving you some context so you understand how small we are um which is important something like GDC but our studio is roughly divided in half um there are approximately four bizdev and marketing um Community Management and launch operation staff and then kind of everyone else is on either QA or development um and that's about like 12 people um we also have a few like floaters as far as like contract workers who pop in and out on various mostly engineering tasks um we also work with a marketing um Studio out of the UK called Ico or IO um and they help roll out our PR and marketing plans and we've done this since 2021 um our launches have kind of gotten too big for just the four of us I specifically run the biz side of Fini I'm also a core creative team member on um both community and marketing initiatives that we produce and I'm also a member of the creative team on our internal development um

our game that we're making internally uh it's a really big job um and I sometimes wonder what I got myself into when I go to work every morning um I am also and this is very important I'm always the first to know when my studio and my games are being considered for high-profile marketing events um those emails come to me directly and it's my job to ensure that our teams are prepared to support both external marketing initiatives and internal marketing plans and we have been involved in a lot of them so that's who I am just some context um and I have a question oh it is doing this okay so fun bug in PowerPoint and I'm just going to point this out so you understand why I'm going back and forth is that is supposed to say marketing and now it does so if I go back and forth I apologize I don't know what's going on with PowerPoint right now um so the schedule problem we are just mining our our own business we're like running our development um Milestones we're like getting our Dev teams all together and then marketing comes in it's like marketing initiative

you need to make a trailer in 6 weeks and you're like yeah Fu are you insane we can't do that and that's our schedule problem a team comes in drops a massive project change onto your team without notice and you're left scrambling to figure out how to deliver the project and also make a game because the to deliver the project the outcome requires that you pull development resources off the current milestones and this will often halt the bottle or basically halt everything bottleneck development in a pretty serious way and we've all done this um so are there any marketing folks here in the room yeah hi you're you're team marketing uh everyone else is production and I know for a fact that right now you're like thinking in your head we hate each other so much because marketing comes in it's like I need this thing because we do it came in our email and production's like how dare you come and ask me for this asset we don't have time for this or the budget and both

realities are valid it's just how it is and this talk is like well how can we never have that conversation where we hate each other and we're cursing at each other and uh we act like preschoolers uh in our own offices and roll our eyes and continue to have poor uh collaborative communication practices uh so I want you to know it doesn't have to be this way at least not the way you experience it now um you shouldn't have to delay marketing assets until a request W comes in you can plan for these in your development schedule and it's going to do it again because PowerPoint hates me so external opportunities this is the the thing that we call all of these emails that come in which is our polite way of saying thank you Sony for this external opportunity thank you Nintendo I appreciate that external opportunity um because as a marketing person we also hate these emails and love them because we know what it's going to do to everybody on

the team to support it they're really big projects they're also really good for studios and for your team um anyone who can amplify your message like you should do that um it's very noisy out there so these are self-directed or externally directed times these external marketing opportunities um when you are going to publicly participate in some kind of marketing event um we're at one right now um there are a lot of teams right now they're also flying to PAX East um my team is there right now um there are teams who've been working for months and months to participate at these events with trailers demos and other assets and the events are great but they're also a nightmare to support for any size of Team um so because these events usually start outside um of the studio they have the potential to seriously disrupt the development and schedule of the game um and I don't know about you but I could do without the add additional stress um the Sprints crunch

frustration and burnout um and there should be another way forward so I'm going to give you some context of the kind of I'm trying to think of the kind of external opportunities that we just in the last five years that I have supported with my studio and we'll see if this works so a quick disclaimer um we've supported both PlayStation state of play and Playstation Indies um I've done a Nintendo Direct and a Nintendo Indie World um that Xbox E3 press conference plus their twitch events uh the game awards that's a fun one and very weird uh Apple Keynotes and product launches um also additional partner events conventions uh old PSX PlayStation experience for example demo events plus the online develop uh demo events Etc uh and more and more and more it's like endless these are endless events um and as I mentioned we are a very very small Studio and we are in

these all the time um and it should uh destroy us so the collaborative marketing process I'm going to talk about the process that Fini uses to plan prep and produce marketing assets alongside our internal development schedules across our separate teams of which there are many because we do um publish as well okay went up uh so first planning uh we plan as early as possible and this seems really obvious um and I'll get to this in a second this is the type of marketing strategy that focuses on when a marketing team is considering how to use events around the industry as external megaphones and how those types of Partnerships require deadlines that are externally enforced and we literally spend the bulk of our time in this phase because as long as we plan we are able to prepare all of our things in advance and I'm going to explain how this is possible these are the things that we do to anticipate future marketing asks um and we are given Poss possible outcomes in

collaboration with our marketing teams um to identify the marketing needs um sort of externally with our business partners and then when we get to produce we usually only spend about 10% of our time on this because we've done so much planning and prep work that everything is there everything is ready for us to put together the asset and get it out as soon as possible um a lot of in most cases we're only at a Polish phase when we finally get to this okay so I mentioned this already oh no it's going to do it again I the thing we're going to talk about the most today is how to plan for these things as early as possible and a lot of this is going to be about Communications the questions that you can ask and the things that you can prepare and build into your development schedules okay so questions for production teams and there's a lot of marketers here um they're also for you

as well so we are going to talk about a lot of stuff um since we're all sitting here right now I don't have a very good idea of what kind of Studios you come from I don't know if you're Studio of one or Studio of a thousand so these are going to be kind of high level things that you can take back and use to create a process within your studio um I'm going to do my best to Define things that you may not know and point out things that you might want to research later um I know that I'm speaking to both marketing and production professionals um and I know that some of this might be unknown Territory between those two um like aspects of game development so things we're going to be working together today why is there a disconnect between your discipline schedules in priority how does this limit good collaborative communication how can external marketing asks affect development teams uh your anticip anticipatory pipelines um what how can you build those

I love that I would like to talk to somebody about this bug how can you control for these timelines what kind of milestones and test tasks can you build into your production schedules to address the needs of all of your team and what kind of uh anticip anticipatory pipelines can you build um so we're going to plan as early as possible do you know what information you need the answer is Maybe so when I was asked to give this talk I was in a group of production professionals and someone um I look up to said it would be incredible if there was a talk at GDC that talked about how we can plan for the things in our Mar things for our marketing teams to ask supporting um those just kills our development schedules and it's awful and I was like damn that's like my whole job is my wheelhouse um I can talk about this and when this came up I was a few days from participating in our first Nintendo Direct this was last fall um which took months of preparation for our team um completely over the timeline of when we

were launching I was a teenage EXO colonist um on PC star fronts also PS4 5 and switch um we were also optimizing developing tun night for PlayStation 4 five and Nintendo switch and also running patches on the original Xbox builds of the game we were really really busy and Nintendo coming in and being like how about a direct which is like really big event in our industry um was very scary but we planned for this across our small teams for years before we got to September 2022 these were this was a possibility and an outcome that might have come up and we did a lot of work in advance for it so do you know what information you need to support a marketing initiative possibly do you know what questions you need to ask do you know how to get that information um and this is what we're going to be chatting about first so Dev production there is a misunderstanding about timelines when we talked about marketing timelines and Dev timelines we we are like in different

universes Dev timelines we're talking about weeks months years I love them they're so comfortable for me um when we talk about marketing timelines the email I got this morning may not even exist tomorrow whatever they asked for is no longer even a project it was on fire and now it's gone our task and projects list just for this week will change change completely often we don't have the luxury of weeks and months and years even though we really would like that to exist and when you're talking to each other as production Dev production and marketing this is where the disconnect often happens because we're like well why can't you just give this to me marketing and Dev is like are you insane that doesn't exist it's not going to exist until next year because we're on different schedules

so we need to control for the unknown we need to integrate our marketing team into the development process which is a lot of education and I'm not going to sugarcoat that it is a lot of like no that's a misunderstanding like no that's not how that actually works I love you very much let's go out to lunch and talk about how the holistic process of the studio actually flows together but since your marketing teams goals may change at a moment's notice it's easy to think well let's ignore them until they really need something which I mean been there been ignored before but the opposite is actually a healthier approach because your marketing team is going to need the same assets no matter what and I was talking to somebody earlier I was like can you imagine going up to a Dev team and being like I'm going to need a trailer and the dead team's like what a trailer I'm going to have to launch this game someday and the answer is yes you're going to have to launch these are things you're going to have to make no matter what it has to exist so the idea that this could possibly ever just

drop into your scope is baffling uh so marketing got to remind him a little bit earlier uh so not just the trailer but like you're going to have to have key art you're going to have to have b-roll you're going to probably need a behind closed doors demo these are all things that are so normal to game marketing and we just throw them on the dev team kind of last minute so instead of ignoring them we should be bringing the dev team in we should be educating them on the future assets that they're going to need and we're going to integrate them into your team so you can never be ambushed again but on both sides so how do you integrate this H um how do you sort of take a marketing leave into a development process um and what is the purpose and goal of this relationship so we have knowledge on the game design that's happening outside the game and I'll explain that one second we have knowledge on the game design that's happening inside the game producers know

what's happening on inside inside the game and marketing leads know what's happening outside the game and you can have a meeting about these two things I want to not necessarily back up exactly but I am going to tell you a little bit about marketing design um in just one second um you're going to want to structure the meetings that you have between these two types of design um to get at the goals of your team and what ideas that you have and what timelines that they're planning for um how do you want to talk about your project to the outside world and these are all going to feed back into what you should be working on internally so sitting down with your marketing team means that you can do the following marketing can play the game and ask questions they can review design documents like story Bibles not to make the game more marketable but to ask them what ideas they have about future marketing angles production can ask what types of marketing materials the marketing team would like to access and

when they think they might need those assets and then they can continue to circle with regular meetings closer and closer and closer um to launch um because development is going to continue and continue to hone in on like the exact marketing meth the exact marketing message um outside of this um outside of like internal from the studio the communication that needs to happen outside so the more you know uh we need to document the possibilities and this relationship requires a give and take from the design team and the marketing team so you're going to need to sort of dig down and talk about like how would these possible initiatives these marketing initiatives overlap future external deliverable schedules so what does that mean these are words that I'm spouting at you imagine that you're like I'm going to be in a state of play in when do state of plays happen out February October so those two dates February October

sometimes the middle of the year one I'm going to be in a state of play in October of this year or I want to work towards that that's going to require a trailer it's going to require a blog posts if a marketing team knows that they would like to make some kind of announcement like that they would have that information probably at least at least a year in advance that that's what they're going to be working towards and if you as a production team don't ask that question when would you like to announce a thing you cannot develop something to support it so how do these possible initiatives fit into partner expectations so we partner with a lot of people Xbox PlayStation Nintendo Apple what expectations do they have about this has the marketing team who talks to these Partners expressed the goals to you the dev team because otherwise you're going to be making two different things and then how do these things that they're asking for impact development at a glance um um can you

see where you're going to fall short on the expectations that people outside of your development structure have so to answer these questions you should um be looking at your development schedule you need to ask are you building the right parts of the game to support future marketing assets you should be able to answer that like if marketing comes back and like I'm pretty certain I'm going to need to put a boss fight in a trailer next year boss fights take a little while she'd probably like I need to push some stuff around like we're going to have to build a boss fight um if your publisher or partner wants to see um like a different angle working towards a marketing asset or they have an angle that they want to work towards if you don't know what that is you can't build for it um so yeah there's you need to be able to take your marketing team um that like there are two true things like here's an update and give good parameters and

boundaries on what is settled content and what is not and then talk about external schedules and partner expectations that might change in morph on Long development schedules and then you have to need you need to follow up again and again and again in all of your meetings so the more the dev team nodes knows uh in order to get your development team to um understand the things that you're going to be working for you're going to need to communicate future marketing opportunities to the creative leadership um so I marketing teams we're just going to sort of Bounce outside of this for a second marketing teams have uh internally we call them a marketing beat schedule other teams might call it something else where they might look at the two years in front of you and be like I based on the development schedule that's been expressed to me we're going to probably want to announce a title here we're going to need to do these certain things in between our next big beat which might be a demo another content

Drive uh and that's going to be sort of mapped out over the course of like a couple of years it's going to have like social media it's going to have advertising be a lot of stuff in a marketing be schedule anytime that you have one of those things a marketing team should be able to take that to your creative leadership and to the production schedule and sort of talk about the range and scope of what's going on inside of that particular document because marketing is able to see opportunities here and here and here um and we need to be able to put together the most important and interesting parts of the game in order to support those particular um marketing initiatives as part of that as a production team you're going to sort of with with the marketing team identify the sort of parameters around this basing like this on as an evaluation of what is possible versus what is desirable so you're sort of filling in the boundaries of the sort of full scope of um the sort of development uh schedule

sitting out in front of you and you're probably going to say but Becca my creative team is really difficult my marketing team is really difficult but as a producer it's your job to be able to go into a meeting between a creative team and a marketing team and identify the problems that marketing is saying that they need to solve and the creative team the assets and the development that can solve them like it's your job to sort of put put those two pieces together um in order to communicate future marketing opportunities to the creative um leadership if the if the people who make the creative decisions don't know what the future expectations likely might be um you're not actually going to be able to make well-intentioned decisions to be able to support them which involves identifying the overlap between

marketing and what you're building because what you're building is so huge and what marketing is building is so huge and there's only a very small uh overlap in the middle of identifying the marketing needs from development uh and it's like what part of the game that you're making fulfills this in the coolest way um so there are some examples of things that you can do kind kind of during this particular time um if you've had the conversations if you're able to identify the problems that the marketing team is intending to solve um there are lots of parts that you can plan for in advance so for example you're going to have to build a trailer um an announce trailer title announce trailer um are you able to storyboard this in advance are you able to sit down with your marketing team identify the talking points that marketing team is going to have to um prepare materials around um

it's going to be an action RPG with x amount of combat and this um sort of uh main character um fulfilling these genre requirements with the assets that you have and the development um like sort of vertical slice uh the game that you have available can you storyboard out what is possible in that exact moment and how does that adapt throughout the next possibly up to a year before you actually have to make that trailer you're already sitting on the plans um before you have to go into actually developing that asset a thing that we do often is we build our vertical slices to also accommodate different types of demos um so when we go into pre-production and then early production we're already sitting on at least 45 up to like 90 minutes of a game that we developed intentionally to support early marketing asks like a

15-minute show demo that we can cut very quickly out of it um it's all all been highly polished or um uh gone through like all the VFX treatments um and we can also cut that into a longer sort of online steam demo that's early early assets and sometimes we have that done upwards a year in advance um we also do this because this can also be cut into a trailer as well we're sitting on at least 90 minutes of game we cut that into a trailer and then we are not asking for additional assets when that does come in so this is all done because this is all um these are all assets that are going to be needed and we can frontload them and then sit on those for as long as possible because there're going to be marketing needs that would ordinarily destroy our studio uh we didn't used to do this the first tunic trailer that came out at the E3 Showcase in 20 sometime in the past I don't know years

have 2018 uh we didn't have any of this sitting around and we had to do whole like boss designs for it which is why the librarian looks very different than it does now in the final game it's CU that was designed in about four weeks before the trailer put together um and that was a huge problem when we were going to launch the game like would somebody actually notice the answer is no I so we prepare in advance um this is sort of what came out of that particular experience with which was we had to stop tunic development entirely in 2018 in order to build a trailer um we have stopped doing that um we prepare almost everything that we do in advance um and we scheduled this into production itself if we know we have a trailer everyone has a trailer everyone in this room you're making games you have a trailer the thing that you should be thinking of right now is what the hell in the build that you're making can be used in a trailer what story are you trying to tell and your marketing team does know that information um so another FY example um tunic needed a new demo as we were

sprinting towards launch um to address an issue that we had with future players thinking that the game was more Zelda than Dark Souls um which if you saw early tunic stuff it was like a fox running around a dappled forest with a sword and wearing a tunic the name has nothing to do with that but uh wearing a little green shirt and like looks like a Zelda clone and we were very aware of it um but the game also has tricky combat and a lot of Secrets it really in a puzzle game um but we knew this back in 2019 and 2020 that this was going to be a massive problem with launch um and we communicated this um specifically because we identified it in marketing we identified it across a lot of axes that this was absolutely going to uh challenge the expectations that our players had when we did launch the game um and on the development side when we talked about this they started to sketch out how a new marketing asset could be made to identify um what was wrong with this and then we overlapped this

specifically with the development schedule to make sure that it was going to be done in advance that we had a demo that identified the fact that tunic needed uh sort of a rework on um making people understand that the game had pretty tricky combat the pieces of this were complete uh in September of 2020 we did not launch this until June of 2021 um we built it into the production schedule we aligned it along side tunic getting finished up we cut it and we sat on it for 7 months waiting for the appropriate marketing timeline to be basically given to us Xbox was running a demo event we pulled the demo um sent it off to reporting Studio two weeks later we had a demo that had gone through certification um that was all planned in advance and sort of sitting in the wings for as soon as somebody had it ready to go um and yeah we planned it we prepared for it well in advance um pulled the asset together and

we already had the full marketing Buy in from everybody every stakeholder before it happened because it did happen over the course of a year so where are you going to schedule this in production these are all obvious assets and that was this is one of the hardest things when I was making this talk like the SC these are obvious things that have obvious gain game assets like they have things that come out of the build you can't make a game playay trailer without a game so why is it that when we come in and say we need a trailer it's like a new idea that has happened before it's because we don't have these conversations we're not coming in saying in a year we're probably going to need a Gameplay trailer um or we're saying and nobody's listening and I can't do anything about that so what I say that these are obvious assets and then I realized that they're not

because what do marketing teams need what are some of the things there's probably going to be a lot more CU there might be like why I need all these like advertising assets and I didn't include those because most of them overlap with a bunch of this other stuff so we sometimes need to show flower demos if you still travel to things like packs or can handle doing those um or I mean they're here like if you just walk out here on second and third floor there's a whole bunch of show floor demos or down at the day of the de so it's a show floor demo usually like a 15minute demo that self restarts um it's been locked off in some ways so if somebody wants to come up and steal it they can't um like that's a thing that has to come from the game itself we also need trailers they come in a variety of lengths 45 60 90 seconds or longer uh there's also screenshots usually without UI depending on who you're working with there's b-roll we have online demos which have different constraints than a show floor demo usually a little bit longer um because it's going to be on like a steam uh online event um or it can be replayed

you also have the gifts social media assets we also have interviews I'm including this because this is a deliverable you have to do PR training you have to be up on talking points what does marketing what did they identify has been a problem and you can talk to that oops um and then there's also store texts and blog posts all of the these are the sort of things that you can prepare for you can do all of these things in advance we do our PR and marketing training like months in advance sometimes we even do like practice interviews um because it's good to do if you're going to put devs out in front of people you should probably train them how to talk to people because interviews are weird so what are you making now to support marketing because we have our marketing plan we have your game what part of your in development game can double as your future marketing needs from development uh internally we're like What can you make now that is cool

enough for later um and we do frontload lots of cool stuff so I brought up this example earlier just because it we literally rely on this all the time um vertical slice has a weird like sort of terminology here in the industry um because it can be everything sometimes this is just like I it's like your pretty Corner some people call it that um it can be like 15 minutes it can also be like a huge portion of your game it could be like upwards of 3 hours however you define that's kind of up to you but in general whenever we start a project and we get I mean currently it's usually about two issues into something um we usually have a very very pretty very very set very polished and ready to go vertical slice we always always cut that up into two different things we have our show floor demo um and we have our online demo and that usually is like about a 45 minute um experience meant to

be replayed again and has good game Loops the vertical slice is always also cut into a trailer so it needs to include the full scope of the game so if you have a narrative and an action component and a boss battle if you have a magical system and you have the things that are important all of these things are present because they get cut into the trailer even though it's only going to be like a snippet of it it is a thing that you are going to want to include to tell a story um because every single one of the like frames of your trailer will be screenshotted individually so people be like whoa what is that it's a marketing tool so the kind of the more things you add as far as gameplay gives more conversations for your future players to talk about those also that same trailer gets cut up in your screenshots you can use the same asset to make your screenshots it also gets cut up or it is uses the key art like as part of like the start and finish of it uh all of our trailers get cut up up into our social media gifts we use the exact same asset for this um and that

includes sort of everything that goes up on social media this is one thing that we built early on in development and it supports all of our initial launch assets there we go so responsive assets um uh responsive assets is sort of like the term that I have for um um so when develop knows what marketing needs to address the development can work on parts of the game that respond to that need that's what I refer to as responsive assets um you're working together with the team who's tasked with communicating to the public about your game and you are building a development process understanding what might be needed in the F future to address that asset asset um or to address that need um if you

aren't making a responsive asset you're just making an asset that doesn't have a plan behind it like if if you're not talking to your marketing team it's not responsive you're just making stuff um and you have no concept or understanding of like what people are saying or what people are needing or possibly even like the cultural implications of what you're putting out there um there's also Business Development needs so um in the tunic example if we didn't manage our partners expectations um we would have like sort of missed the boat on reviews and player expectations and support cues specifically if we didn't tell people that there was combat alongside Zelda like we would not have managed those expectations it would not have responded to the things we knew that were happening out in public um and your marketing team like kind of knows all of this stuff if they're asking the right questions like

they know that there are problems they're out there listening to culture like their whole job is to design a place out in the world for your game to exist if you're not utilizing them and asking them the things that they're seeing you're kind of missing the bow on being able to design and Implement responsive assets and it's kind of on you to work with them to build the best version of this um communication structure of understanding what they see and how that feeds back into your development process because what we prepare is going to change how it's positioned sort of out in the world um and it it's just it's going to feed back constantly um so I have a second example of sort of a weird responsive asset um and it's a very very small piece of a tunic trailer um and I didn't actually put it in here uh because you can you can just check it online because it takes too long to show it but we needed to put together a launch trailer for tunic that showed a lot more of the game

than we had showed in the past um previously we had only ever shown the forest in the caves and various assets that we had but we needed to hint at sort of the larger bosses the scarier Parts the combat the secrets the manual that was in some of the assets that were out there but not in the way that they launched um the trailer had a lot of things to communicate and the first trailer um the drafts that we had of it uh went hard at all the things but it felt really wrong like there was just something off about it and we were pitching different ways to sort of fix the issues and the problem was that the opening was wrong um and the opening what ended up in the final trailer actually came out of marketing and the need was this we needed a trailer that would remind the player who the main character of the fox is um everyone kind of recognized the fox um but the game had been in development for a very very long time things go in and out of like common knowledge um and

we needed to kind of acknowledge that directly to the player so what we did was we made a trailer that basically was like this was like the sentence that came up in the conversation it was like oh hey it's the little fox I remember him oh he waved at me I played that demo once oh that's a huge boss like that's literally how we opened that trailer and that was like the marketing sentence uh that was the marketing need that we had it's like we need to bring them back in we need to cheeky wave at them which maybe we can pull off maybe we can't and then like yeah and there's a big eff spider tank was the spider Tank's actual name I don't know we call this I called the spider tank the yeah the big Stompy Monster uh and he screams and then it goes into the Hard trailer and it was like look at all the place this is how big the scope of this game is it was one tiny asset but it was an asset that responded to a need that we saw in the community so part of this is we develop 90% assets

and I've talked about this concept before other GDC talks but if you have an understanding of the future deliverable and the constraints of this you can prep your 90% assets this is so that when you get that request you are at the Polish phase already and you can only make a 90% asset if you know what your marketing team needs you need a trailer it needs to respond to a need you've put the development pieces of that into your development schedule well in advance so you can build your marketing asset when it is convenient to you I we rely on this 100% of the time because a 90% asset for a trailer is we are mastering a trailer we are putting on the uh branding the pneumonics on the side we are porting a demo that already exists that is a 90% asset because we are able to do that on a timeline that doesn't hurt

people it also allows for more collaborative approach to marketing um we're able to involve the development team in designing these Assets in a way that is conducive to the talent and Brilliant Minds that are on your development teams because they know the game and you know the market because we have to produce these things on better timelines I work with very small teams and every single one of these initiatives that we've been involved with could hurt people and have hurt people and your goal at the end of the day is to not burn out your brilliant collaborators that you work with because you've planned and you have prepped you've done the design work and you've started building the asset well before it's due because we work in games and everyone has to deliver the same assets so things that I mentioned we Master things in that last 10% we um sometimes have storyboard and placeholders um for a trailer and we

put it into full production because if you know the Beats you can pull the clips um and it kind of it goes real fast if you know what you're building um first store assets if you have your key art and your identity done in advance it's easier to pull to store assets you can also take final screenshots from your current builds the tasks are easier to get full stakeholder Buy in if you're already sitting on them and they've already been approved because we polish when we have the final info it is possible because marketing asks change regularly you might be like I'm developing a trailer and next week you're not because the event is gone it has been cancelled if you are always ready to participate it's not a big deal if it's canceled because you have not moved whole development schedules to support it you just change the final 10% cuzz it's so easier it's so much easier if you do it

that way um because for external opportunities it's always going to be a timeline crunch there's no way out of it it just is they're going to hold on to that news and they're like okay we need a trailer in two weeks we want a sample of it in 12 days I've had worse than that I need b-roll in 36 hours in some format that you've never seen before this is the crap that comes in and I'm trying to be positive about it but it's just how marketing requests work it's just what my email inbox looks like it's always going to be a timeline crunch so if it's going to be a damn timeline crunch we have to fix our timeline because there's no that piece is immovable so we have to do our things in advance we have to talk to our Dev teams so how am I doing on time I'm good right okay good uh polish less 10% I have three examples um that I just want to run through so chory trailer number two uh we launched this thing in February of 2021 and I'm just going to

I'm just going to tell you when we actually did this asset um because I think it's interesting we had our 90% asset done in Spring of 2020 we had a trailer literally done it hadn't been mastered and it needed to be cut a little bit slightly too long done in Spring of 2020 we just sat on it waiting we negotiated to put this in at least four different marketing events between spring of 2020 and when it finally was on like the Playstation blog in 2021 and we just held on to it until we found the right spot the tunic combat demo same thing with the 90% asset done in September of 2020 we did not launch it until June of 2021 because we had this done we were able to negotiate an IGN exclusive look at the PC demo if we had gone too far we would never have been able to do that the IGN exclusive look that code went out in February of 2021 that's how really they had access to it and if we

hadn't considered that that was a possibility it would not have been possible same thing with the tunic launch trailer we started planning and negotiating all of that in January of 2021 um we got Derek Lou who's done a bunch of like GDC like he's awesome he had the builds of that by the summer and he was already playing through the builds and pulling things um and then we were working on storyboards through that whole fall um this is just the we have to do it this way we have to build all this stuff in when we're actually doing the work for it and right now I'm doing the same thing on my two unannounced projects we are ramping up all of these early marketing assets to make sure that we don't just stop development because we can't do that if we stop development the game doesn't get made on time so the question is for your team why is there a disconnect between your discipline discipline schedules and priorities part of it might be an attitude adjustment I mean it was for us like if I go in I'm like I just need

like one don't say just but I need this thing and I need it tomorrow it's like yeah well put it on a damn schedule man like that sucks you know these things are going to be made so how do we communicate better and have better timelines even from marketing we know what we're going to need so let's tell our production teams about it early and as production teams you know marketing is going to need stuff so ask them what they need when do they think they're going to need it and if they're like I know be like no no no no no no no give me some sample timelines what do you think could happen because you can work with that how does this limit team good team collaborative communication like obviously you hate each other and that's like just kind of a miserable environment to work in how do your external marketing ask affect your development team's anticip anticipatory pipelines uh you don't have them if you don't know what's coming if you don't know what's possible if you don't know what the marketing team is planning for or what they're hoping for what they're

dreaming for you can't build anything to help support it how can you control for timelines you can't you can't control for external timelines you can only control for your internal timelines what kind of milestones and tasks will you build into your production schedules to address the needs of all of your team find out what the needs are for all of your team and that has to include markeet they are designers they are designing how your team and how your game is going to be presented to the public and build the pipelines for that so plan as early as possible we spend all of our time in planning I don't have a game announc for quite a long time and we are already building all the assets for it this was the same thing for all of our previous projects because we learned from experience that we're going to hurt people otherwise we prepare way in advance as long as we have slightly too much information as long as we focus on the

things marketing thinks we might need on our development schedules we build those things then we're sitting on the assets before we need them and then we produce on better timelines because we are already sitting on everything we need because we ask the questions that need to be there and this is me eventually that PowerPoint will show up um and I think we do have a few minutes for questions um and apologies for my PowerPoint it's been doing some Wild Things there's some slides out of order and I don't know why because they weren't an hour [Applause] ago oh sorry I will repeat this after you say it great thank you so we talked about production and marketing timelines aligning and I think it's really great

first question is do you have dashboards globally across the company that have those two timelines um visible okay so we were just actually talking about this because my husband was giving me a bunch of question oh yeah AP shut up uh so do we have Global dashboards uh so we work in a small company and the answer is yes but the small version small company version of this um we keep most of our information on notion specifically for our company um and it works slightly different depending on if it's an internal project or an external project so within marketing we do have sort of a like overall look at everything that's going on and then it's actually broken out um so for external we usually keep this kind of over in uh a google google doc something that they can actually work with and then internal on our internal project they can sort of see all of the pieces of it um but yes uh the important piece of that though is because it is flexible and it

has to be adaptable things move around a lot so if you're not doing these constant check-ins like you can't rely on um a I'm okay I'm just going to talk about Adam so Adam runs my husband he runs the creative team I can't expect him if I change something to know that I changed it he's not going to get that updated so if I'm like radically moving lots of things around or I some console just emails me and I'm adding a new important highlight for one of our projects it is super important for me to raise that red flag right away because it is going to radically change development and that will come up almost instantly into our um every single Monday we do our um sort of creative team standup where we do highle discipline breakdowns in all of our creative teams and we actually have a whole section that is bis Devon marketing so anything that changes gets highlighted right there um usually kind of high if it's really high up and it

needs to change anything radically it gets just higher priority but usually at the bottom um anything that I'm going to bring into that meeting is 4 to 10 weeks in advance minimum um because I bring it up immediately as soon as I know something I come and like I'm pretty certain I'm going to have to do this here is the breakdown of what I think I'm going to need what are we lacking from this and usually we have the majority of it sitting around but yeah there's a lot of nothing gets ignored as soon as there's a flag we raise it because otherwise it's never going to get done you're just yeah you can't you can't drop stuff like that into people's laps it's mean I've been there yeah it's awful I think we all have been there uh part two of the question is now we have marketing we have production timelines what is the third fourth fifth timeline that fits into this global syn oh the I mean the rest of everything so

what are the other timelines that should be fitting into this like we have our marketing and production timelines we should be talking like where is advertising fitting into this like where is our events and Logistics fitting into this like how is the QA process also on top of this we rely on our QA to help us get uh sort of our final screenshots even at the end of a game like that's not all on marketing um because they know the by the time a game launches our QA team knows the game better than anyone else on the planet and they're like I found something really cool and they will be raising that flag like everything by the end of this understands like in our QA standups we have a whole space for marketing initiatives and like BISD things that need to be highlighted like it has to if you're going to have a collaborative communication process it's holistic and they're oops excuse me they're working across all of our team teams you have to be able to have everyone kind of on the same page to raise to raise the

important issues to answer important questions and know when things are going to be due if you have a demo an Xbox demo for example going live your QA team needs to know when the hell that needs to go into certification because they're the ones that are overlapping with your porting Studio or the engineering team internally who are doing that Port like it has to be there thank you yeah of course I'll be back in a minute whatever hi great talk Rebecca first of all is your studio based in Grand Rapids it is small world I'm from Hastings Michigan South yeah great I'm from fville Michigan can I say that out loud the wildest smallest town in Michigan great um one question for you I'm working on a team that is just about to move into pre-production um and we're just starting to set up some rituals with our marketing team um and our production team to make sure that we're just aligned in our goals and that we're setting up Milestones that reflect a

shared Vision instead of separate goals on separate tracks what sort of rituals did you find to be successful for your team to ensure solid cohesive communication between the two groups o it's a good [Music] question uh okay so one caveat uh I run Biz marketing and my husband runs creative but we do work with external teams uh Adam and I have a really just a really good communication process because he got so sick of me coming in with marketing things and because we obviously have a very close relationship he was like this fing sucks we need to have a better process for this um the main thing one of the main things we did right away is like we one we never bash marketing we can be upset about the fact that we have to do something on a timeline we can be frustrated by the fact that somebody has EXT internal requests of us um but the people who are

answering those emails and making those requests out of line to go after them uh and that sort of like that alone builds a lot of trust so if somebody's like I need to do this and it is on a tight timeline and I need you development team to help me with this it's like I understand that you have an external uh request because you're on a different timeline than I am on and like that big basine respect for each other's disciplines has gone a long way thank you a long way to sort of alleviate a lot of the issues and it is done by example um but in doing so we've also included like in our marketing teams we talk about development in our development creative teams we talk about marketing we raise the important things that each team is doing to make sure that people are understanding that we are on different schedules regularly but also that we are working towards the same thing together because marketing is designing how your game is going to land and the game designers are designing the

game and they are not they don't have access to the end user the way a marketer like a marketing team does right thank you so much does that do that answer your question it does okay cool hi uh you almost uh answered my question is how is you have any tip or how you deal with G I mean when the te the development team is too much involved on the marketing decisions so uh you know it's not the same um an ing game um I know this or that the trailer is not the same a K in game you want a load screen that are marketing here so the good thing of you know probably this your the market that everyone know about marketing so we are so lucky that every we receive advice from everyone so how you deal with that say like you were saying I have knowledge and I have number that you probably don't know how

you handle that how you manage that yes so the question is um when somebody is kind of outside their Lane basically like when you have a Dev team who is like I know more about the way a trailer should be than you do or uh I know more about uh the honestly for the marketing team in here be real careful going in and having opinions on mechanics do you know more about that than the people who do this every day and the answer is yes sometimes you do that is true you are often you should be part of that conversation um I had a really funny sorry real quick tangent a friend was giving a talk at GDC this week and their marketing team came in to try to change their stuff to have a bunch of talking points in it and it's just like in your lane you can't do that to a GDC talk like it's that sort of thing like so understand like the where is your actual expertise yes but very specifically how do we ensure

that development doesn't change the actual like sort of design work and the needs from marketing team and this comes out in the planning process the second that we try to do this too fast now we are in uh we're in a situation where we cannot solve things with time and discussion and we have to make a decision based on ego and I don't know Fury uh the longer that you have to discuss this to plan to identify to share research the better able you are to build a thing that actually identifies the needs of the market to be responsive of a thing because you have more time to build your case and nobody's coming into something stressed and hot and mad because you've already imploded a development schedule which is another reason why we do this early because building something on a tight timeline is going to introduce those uh they're just ego decisions I know best

it's my game I know the lore better and I mean it's sort of like when you get a pitch and it's all lore you're like no no no baby you're just too close you got the blinders on you got to take a step back and tell me what's actually cool about your game CU it's not that that's that's the it's the same very human feeling is to like take a step back you probably don't know best and you do need to look at it with like really calm sensible eyes but yeah time time and planning thank you you're welcome I think I have one question can I do one more question okay hi Rebecca thank you so much for the talk uh my background is in development but I work in marketing now so I feel very seen by this uh my question for you is for our team we've been focusing a lot on tool development for my marketing team for like how we can like capture the build or work you know like take some of the work off the dev team and do that and I wanted to know if you had any thoughts about how you've handled that at Fini uh for Tool

development well we're small enough that we don't have a done a ton of it um however we do have a lot of discussions um sort of at like a top top level of we are going to have to support this thing and who is available to help support it um because there are people who are infinitely qualified especially for capturing builds um or they have to like run things in unity or I'm going to have to run it on device so I'm like capture carding with the QA team to pull that cuz like my marketing team doesn't have a damn dev kit sitting around and I have to run this off of a PS5 in the office and that's off a capture card we plan this stuff so far in advance that like we put it into Pockets um and that's our way around these legitimate bottleneck um moments um but we do have to get Buy

in from everybody I can't just go into QA and be like I need fill in the blank I can't have that it does need to be like this scheduled thing and it because it's not their main job it might be they spend a couple hours capturing something very exact um because we usually map out we need this exact thing we would like it to look like this and can you provide a couple of options of this um can you go through this Boss scene like three times and for them they're like hell yeah I I can definitely do that because I can do that Boss scene with my eyes closed um we also will use um like internal to the build itself we have a whole bunch of uh depending on what we're doing we'll script out whole scenes of things if we have to captured on device will like push that into the build for marketing itself because it has to be run on device so like Fox waving for example that was a scripted scene that Andrew put together that we pushed through and then captured off um and we do a lot of that but we do have to we spell out we would like to do this we would like the camera to pan like

this um and we spec that out scope it out and then talk to our Dev teams to see when in the schedule can that be available and what debug menu um can we access to be able to pull that um but usually done pretty far in advance um and oftentimes especially in some of our past stuff both chory and tunic especially um a lot of it was already being thought about of like it would look real cold like this it would be cool if we could spin it like this um and they were already asking those questions kind of of us for future marketing ass because they knew I'm going to have to make a trailer of this eventually and I don't want to be ambushed with weird um weird camera Cuts or something does that answer your question it does thank you yeah of course okay I think that's all we have time for I can go over to wrap up if anyone wants to pick my brain about whatever I'm cool with that um and wrapup is Windows on that side of the building um but yeah

[Applause] [Music] thanks