Some of the most influential people in the industry have been too busy doing the work to talk about the work – until now. Engineer turned producer Cory Tsang is one of the few original Sims object engineers who has gone on to a second career in production on live-service games at Elder Scrolls Online and beyond, taking what he learned building some of the world’s top games and applying that insight to how we make games. People with this rare cross-disciplinary insight are the ones who can help us understand each other and truly become better than the sum of our parts – and Cory’s unreserved passion for improving the tools and processes that make us better at working together is a gift not just to the teams he works with, but now to the folks listening to this episode. Of course, since we’re both Sims veterans, we do take some time to dive into the old days – the good and the bad – so we can learn from the past as well as the present. And if you want to understand how a JIRA ticket is like a Sims toilet? You’ll have to listen to the episode.
Listen Now: Season 2 Episode 9
Key Quotes
Moving to Elder Scrolls Online production, I had to let go some of my instincts of design and engineering because I’m not the one doing the work. I’m there to support the people doing the work. It’s funny, because I’ve encountered people who believe that you have to be a discipline expert to be a producer for the team, because they’re expecting you to call BS on things like how long it takes them to do it. And I think that’s the wrong approach, because our job isn’t to fact check people. We’re there to trust the team because they’re the ones who are on the hook for delivering, who actually have to do the work. How do you coach that person to get there? So as a producer, it was more about helping people work better.
It’s funny, I don’t care as much about the individual tasks, because they’re not for me, they’re for the people doing the work. If it’s too small for them, then it’s too small for me. The importance is really in the questions and the problems we’re trying to solve at a production level. When I was art producer on ESO, the art teams were supporting multiple projects. Whether it’s the dungeon team or content or marketing monetization pipelines, we had to be able to split our time across multiple efforts. So being able to see how they could merge those timelines into a single schedule that can deliver the most that we can and still keep people working sane hours? I think that’s the biggest thing with live services. It has to be sustainable development.
The reason why I got into production: is because on the Sims, we were crunching every three months for like, two months at a time, and it was really destructive to my social life. And in fact, when I became a DD, we had this policy: if you identified a problem, you had to be part of the solution. And so I noticed a certain pattern in our decision making that continuously triggered crunch. And so they’re like, “Okay, well, now you have to do some DD work too,” on top of what I was doing engineering wise. And we actually didn’t crunch that project. It was SimAnimals 2: I we did one Thursday until 11, and one Saturday, and that was it. I ended up marrying my girlfriend. I kept on losing them in this cycle of “disappear for crunch,” but I was able to hold on to that one long enough that we ended up getting married. Three kids.
One of the big principles of what I do now is I want to make it as easy as possible for people to create work. People should always ask for what they need, regardless of whether they think another person has time for it, because usually things that show up late are actually high priority. And so what we need is an easy intake system and then an easy way of looking at that in context of all the other work to be able to then prioritize it in the big picture. There’s been plenty of instances in the past where, you know, a team is underwater, and they’re like, “Oh, don’t ask them, because they’re too busy,” right? But if you ask them, and this thing is really high priority, we can look at our our thing and insert it, right? But if you never ask for it, then it won’t get done, and we may have missed an opportunity. And so you always have to allow the asks.
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