In the previous iterations of Unlocking the Vault, we took a look at a few GDC talks that have stood the test of time, offering useful development advice or wisdom from days past. It was a bit of an experiment in evergreen treasure-trawling, especially given our site’s relationship to the GDC Vault, which contains the overwhelming majority of GDC Festival of Gaming talks since the 90s. There’s a lot of great stuff in there, and any excuse to go spelunking is a welcome one.
We’re reviving the concept now, but doing one better: highlighting a talk or resource that a working game dev still finds useful and relevant, and speaking with them about it!
For this first (new) edition, we chatted with CD Projekt Red senior technical producer Shayna Moon via email about Ruth Tomandl’s GDC 2013 talk Production 101 (part of the Producer Bootcamp talks), on how it inspired them to go towards game production and the enduring advice Tomandl gives on the profession.
The talk is available here on the GDC Vault.
Game Developer: When did you first encounter Ruth Tomandl’s talk? Were you already working in the discipline, or new to it?
Shayna Moon: GDC 2013 was my first GDC that I attended, I was in my third year of my Digital Animation and Game Design program at Ferris State University. I had done an art internship at a studio in Michigan called Yeti CGI and my mentor, Mel Danes, identified that production was something I might like to do. He encouraged me to go to production talks when I went to GDC. Prior to this, I had heard about production but didn’t have a clear picture in my mind of what the job actually entailed.
What about the presentation spoke to you or inspired you?
I decided to go back and rewatch the talk for this interview and it remains an incredibly strong primer for what the job of a producer is. It has a ton of great advice for how to be a great producer and how to avoid bad habits.
It also has a good balance between the hard and “soft” skills needed for production. I would feel totally comfortable sending the video to anyone I wanted to understand my job better. I also realized through this talk the power that a producer can have. A good producer can be a huge force multiplier to their team, while a bad producer can be a millstone around their neck. Through production I saw a future where I could make the games industry significantly better.
GD: Are there elements of the talk that haven’t aged well—not as a criticism of the speaker, simply as an acknowledgment that we live in a very different industry (and world!) in 2026.
The production to QA pipeline:
Ruth brings QA up as a possible path to production. She’s 100 percent right, and QA gives you a ton of the same skill set that you need in production. They have a unique holistic video of the game’s progress and are the closest people you have to the player. I try to always be super close and communicative with the QA professionals I work with.
Unfortunately, the QA to production role pipeline seems a lot more rare, these days. Some of that is because QA roles are overwhelmingly contract roles these days, if you’re lucky enough to have embedded QA. Otherwise, you might not have anyone on the team doing the job of a QA tester or engineer, and it might be a totally third party company. Don’t get me wrong, those companies do great work, but less on site QA means less opportunities for the rest of the team to get to know the testers and identify who has the production mindset.
Ruth emphasizes that if the game doesn’t ship or doesn’t do well, people don’t get paid, I’m not trying to be flippant, but these days the quality and sales of the games you work on do not matter when it comes to your employment. You can ship a hit and lose your job, you can ship something middle of the road and lose your job, you can ship a totally broken game and lose your job, you might never get the chance to ship a game, and still lose your job. You can’t honestly look at the industry right now and say that there’s any kind of rhyme or reason to why so many thousands of incredible games professionals doing excellent quality work have lost their jobs.
You have the time, you’re a producer:
There’s some nuance to this—but I get the sentiment. As a producer you want to do anything you can to make things easier on your team. If we’re talking about roles in games, producers are the tank. In my professional experience I would say that I have seen far more producers that put too much of themselves into the job as opposed to people who didn’t do enough. You have to have a sense of confidence in your role, and hopefully you have a manager who supports that.
GD: What is a piece (or a couple of pieces) of wisdom from the talk that have stuck with you? Any bits that you have used when solving a problem in your own work?
Being a person who people feel safe delivering bad news to:
This is one of the most important things about the day-to-day job. The further along you get in production on a game, the more intense things get. On big teams, communication can break down and things can slip through the cracks fairly easily. As a producer I work incredibly hard to cultivate a relationship of trust with the people I produce and the leadership of the studio. I never want to make anyone feel like they’re going to be “in trouble” if they come to me with something negative.
Do you get satisfaction from helping people to do their best work? Will you love it?
A lot of people try to get into video games because they like playing games, but to actually love the work of being a game developer, you have to love the process of making games, in all its messy glory. When I went to Ruth’s talk, I was going because a mentor had recommended production as something I might enjoy, I was looking for that thing that would be my goal moving forward as a developer. I was incredibly lucky and found the path to work that I genuinely love.
Get a job with applicable experience (my IT job)
It took me about 2 years from graduating college to get my first games production job, and in that time I had a run-of-the-mill IT job. I appreciated so much Ruth’s advice to make your non-games experiences “as producer-ey as possible.” With that mindset, I was able to approach being in IT from the standpoint of: what can I learn from what I’m doing? What can I learn about the technology I’m interacting with? What can I learn about people? That piece of advice gave me a really great framing for the times in life when I wasn’t able to be directly in the industry.
Bad producers assume they know things
Early in my career, I was producing the God of War audio team. We had just wrapped up the 2017 narrative trailer, and next up was a video for Paris Games Week. With the narrative trailer, it had gone super smoothly, and my audio team was able to quickly do the audio because that trailer was made up of cinematics. But the PGW video was going to be a combat-focused showing.
I made the mistake of assuming that because the narrative trailer hadn’t taken much time, the PGW would, too. And then two weeks before the PGW video was due from us, I showed it to my audio director and I watched his face fall. Because the PGW video was primarily combat-based, that meant they wouldn’t be able to do audio to picture, it had to be implemented, a much longer task. People ended up having to crunch on that video’s audio because I made an assumption. It was a hard lesson to learn.
Game Developer and GDC Festival of Gaming are sibling organizations at Informa Festivals.
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