Being a producer isn't easy. You have to balance the desires with the development team with those of management -- while keeping everyone on the same page, keeping the game on track for release, and making sure that it meets the needs of the business and, most importantly, the players.
Kei Hirono knows a lot about this struggle. He's best known as the producer of Dark Souls -- one of the best-loved games of the current generation -- but he works on other titles, too, in his job as a producer at Bandai Namco Games' Tokyo headquarters. Gamasutra recently caught up with him in San Franciso, where he was promoting the upcoming release of his latest game, Time and Eternity (pictured below).
Our time with Hirono was short, but we were able to assemble this list of tips for successful game development -- including topics like working with multiple companies, keeping management and developers in balance, gaining the trust of your dev team, and what to do in a crisis.
While he agrees that it's a producer's job to keep management pressure off of the development team, "that's not all of it." There is, he says, another side to this story.
"The goals of a producer are naturally going to be based on the goals of the company they're working for. It's important for the development studio and me to be working together as a team, but part of the job does also involve using what your boss tells you to place some pressure on the dev side."
"You can't work that way all the time, of course," he continues. "Pressure like that only works if you pick the right time and situation to use it. It's a balance you have to achieve as you work."
While Hirono thinks that business concerns are "equally important" to creative ones when developing games, neither is so important "to the point where I'd simply take demands from the business and development sides like a robot."
"I have to factor in what direction we want to take the project, and how we can best work together," Hirono says. The most important factor is identifying what the game really needs, Hirono says, particularly when development reaches a crisis point.
"I try to give respect to what the other party wants to do as much as possible. While keeping that in mind, I try to do away with things that aren't useful or are getting in the way. These are things that maybe even the developer realizes need to be cut, but the thing with game creators is they often start with oversized dreams.
"I think part of my job is to help guide these dreams to a point where they can reach reality. So I give them my thoughts about what parts of the project they should concentrate on and what doesn't matter as much. That's an important part of my work, and for the most part things go along pretty well."

1. Getting developers to trust you
Hirono is a producer on the publisher side -- which can put him at loggerheads with the development teams he works with, which are generally external to the company, like From Software, which developed Dark Souls. How do you get an external developer to trust you? "By trusting them. That's the most important thing; to have that back-and-forth," Hirono says. There is, of course, an impediment to that. "It's easy for a publisher to see the developer as working below them in a way, ordering them around like that. I think it's vital that you go with a style that's more together -- 'Let's do this together, let's get this going.'" He says that it's key to remember that the relationship between publisher and developer is a partnership. Personal communication is also important to building this relationship, he says: "this is something you often see in Japan, but some people don't look at people in the face and speak honestly with them, or pay attention to what they're doing. I think it's best to do that, arguing with each other over whether we should do this or do that."2. Balancing the desires of management and developers

