Games producer toolbox

As producer or executive producer, you have a talent for creative thinking, analytics, people and project management, but need the tools coming along with your skills. Here we are assembling some useful tools for games production, but please reach out if you have better ones so that this toolkit is always improving!

Game P&L management

The T. Friedmann template: a simple and efficient tool to track and anticipate the cash burn of your game

Here is another example of template for games budgeting for pre-launch & pitch phases.

The full P&L by TheGamesFund: an exhaustive high level p&l template with revenue forcasts and costs, starting your assumptions on downloads and MAU, starting from real (past) numbers of your game, to extrapolate the projections.

Post mortem

Here is a simple template that you can use freely, made to be overly simple. Frequency is very important: for example you can target 2-week sprints post-mortems and make it a ritual. This will help your team be aligned and always clear on their goals. It’s better done than perfect!

Game project management

Among the many tools specialized in project management for games we can list for example: Plaky, Hacknplan.com, Codecks, Trello, Jira, ClickUp, Asana and Monday.com (which we adopted recently at Atom Stars). Depending on the size of your team and corporate constraints, don’t overthink about the tool.

We created this status update template for you, to offer a simple format that can be used for all your projects. Here is the template:

To access the pptx template, please join as a contributor here

Whatever the tools, what we we found matters the most is to have the discipline to do resource allocation and tracking involving each contributer, do the post mortems with tem after each sprint and check you’re on track with budget and can anticipate/avoid crunch times.

Game design templates

As a producer you can give the vision and align teams. Make sure you have the right components in your design document. Here are a few examples of templates. But don’t forget what Aristotle says on how to convince people: it’s about finding the right balance between Ethos (your credibility), Pathos (emotions) and Logos (rational demonstration). Here is a cool presentation of these concepts in gaming.

You can download a Game Design Document template here, which was prepared by Chris Taylor.

Here are few examples of game design documents of legendary games for inspiration!