Aaah Producers, eh? What fun! Coming in multiple flavours and packaging, I have conveniently distilled them down to the following, so that you may know your enemy comrade.
Alphabetty-Spaghetti
Tasteless. Likes to absorb words they hear programmers and artists use and then spit them back out during meetings to sound clever. Usually uses the words in completely the wrong context, but thankfully nobody is really listening to them anyway.
Dangers: Studio management may not be able to tell the difference between complicated terms being used correctly, and complicated terms being used erroneously to justify a disastrous course of action.
Benefits: You can play the “see if you can get the Producer to use your made-up word in a meeting” game.
Eggs Benedict
Satisfying. An all-round good guy – the sort of chap you’d like to hang out with. Comes from a non-games industry background so knows bollocks all about the technicalities of production, but being an excellent judge of character probably hates the designers.
Dangers: Make sure he likes you. Since he’s a terrific judge of character, at some point he’ll probably piss off somebody in management so will only last one or two projects, sadly.
Benefits: Since he knows he doesn’t know much about game production, will make excellent use of the leads and everything will go swimmingly.
Mince Pie
Mmmmm… pies! Hang on, this isn’t meat… it’s just mashed up fruit skin! GAH! Take it away! Take it awaaaaaay!
Oh, used to be a programmer did you? How nice for you. Stop interfering! Stop it! Get off! Shoo! One of those.
Dangers: Yep, they know everything and like to tell you how to do your job at every possible opportunity.
Benefits: Suck it up, because it will almost inevitably save your project at some point when, like a caged zombie, they turn on their superiors and you suddenly find yourselves with three months extra development time.
Cumberland Sausage
Spicy. A good guy, but almost definitely has something going on on the side – you just don’t know what.
Dangers: Will mysteriously disappear from time-to-time and you’re not sure if it’s to engage in some extra-curricula activities or to report to the bosses that you’ve spent the last two days mucking about.
Benefits: At some point there’ll be something extra-ordinarily juicy to gossip about in the kitchen.