The producer

Turning creative direction into production that delivers.

• Creative DirectorGary Penn
• ProducerSean Taylor

The one who takes creative direction and turns it into production that hits its quality bar, scope and schedule.

The handover

The pilot proved the fun. Then we threw it away.

Quarrel began in 2007 as a three-person pilot, built to prove one thing fast: that the fun was there.

2008Commercial product development starts here.

→ The pilot proved the core idea.→ Taking it to market meant rebuilding Quarrel from the ground up as a commercial product.→ The pilot became our living design document, roadmap and backlog.

The anchors

Before we built anything, we defined what it had to feel like.

The Denki Difference defined our in-house design principles: the End meant thinking like a player; the Way meant thinking like a maker. We codified what the Quarrel pilot proved into ten Guiding Lights beneath the End, giving us a shared vision and a clear test for every production decision.

Quarrel’s Guiding Lights

1. It’s a whole new board game
2. An invisible strategy game
3. Star player performance
4. Worlds worth winning
5. Knowledge is power
6. Characters you can believe in
7. Win or lose, you feel like a winner
8. A meaningful shared experience
9. More jaw-jaw than war-war
10. See letters and words in a whole new light

They weren’t wall art. Every achievement, leaderboard and tweet in the game was checked against them and tagged: [Feel] [Convenience] [Drama].

Pre-production

We rebuilt it from the ground up, one playable slice at a time.

Our 40/20/40 production model still held. On a longer timeline, pre-production became a series of iteration loops, each checked against the End before the next began.

A board game first. We rebuilt Quarrel as a board game with full rules so we could prototype cheaply, test quickly and refine relentlessly. Each day was a sprint around a critical risk or design flaw. Prototypes took minutes. We kept what worked and killed the rest.

Opponents played in character. The team roleplayed each artificial opponent as a player archetype (Impulsive, Cautious, Bully, Coward) until players could recognise its personality through its decisions.

Words you know. And words you discover. We tagged every word in Quarrel’s dictionary by familiarity: about 6,000 most people know, 30,000 some people know, and the remaining 75% few would recognise. Every word came with its official Collins definition, so players could discover new words as well as play the ones they knew.

The production model

Every day, every week, every milestone: a short loop back to the End.

I built the production around short feedback loops, so everyone always had clarity of purpose, plans, progress and priority.

“Someone going out of their way to come back with their wife and kids for a multiplayer game of Quarrel is worth ten filled-in questionnaires.”

— Colin Anderson, 2009

Into the unknown

Three people became ten. A games-for-TV studio learned a console.

Almost everything about Quarrel was new to us: a bigger team, a new platform, online multiplayer and Xbox certification.

The production repertoire was transferable; the new platform was teachable.Work backwards from what’s right for the project, not what you already know.

Again, on iPhone

Then we did it again, on iPhone: five people, twelve weeks, from scratch.

In 2011 we took Quarrel to iPhone with a team of five, on a twelve-week schedule.

• Wk 1–2 Design and proofs
• Wk 3–5 Rough Cut
• Wk 6–7 Alpha
• Wk 8–10 Beta
• Wk 11 Submission Candidate
• Wk 12 Final Cut

WEEK 7

Alpha 2.0: acceptance criteria

• I enjoyed playing Alpha 2.0.
• It looks, sounds, feels and smells like a definitive Alpha.
• It inspires confidence in the final version and leaves players wanting more.
• “Know Quarrel” allows me to learn while I play, but never overwhelms or behaves like a certain annoying paperclip.

Written as a player would say them, not as a checklist. Quarrel Deluxe went live on the App Store on 25 August 2011.

The verdict

Players and critics loved it. The industry took two years to catch up.

• BAFTA ScotlandBest Game, 2011
• BAFTA Games AwardsNominee, 2012
• TIGABest Social Game and Best Serious Game, 2012
• Pocket Gamer AwardsThree nominations, 2012
• EurogamerGames of 2011
• Official Xbox Magazine9/10, Must Buy

“Relentlessly clever and deviously charming… A true, instant classic.”

— Official Xbox Magazine, 2012

“Quarrel is a victory for good ideas and also for clever implementation.”

— Eurogamer, 2011

It was finished for Xbox in 2009, then waited two years at the publisher gate. The reason given most often: “Gamers don’t buy word games.”

It launched on iPhone in August 2011 and on Xbox Live Arcade in January 2012. The production delivered; the route to market was out of our hands.

What transfers

Protect the creative vision. Build the conditions to deliver it.

My role is to turn creative ambition into a game the team can deliver and players want to play. On Quarrel, that meant five production principles:

1. Make the vision actionable. Turn creative direction into shared priorities and clear criteria for decisions.
2. Build production around the project. Choose the team, tools and approach the game needs. Adapt the plan as you learn.
3. Resolve risk early. Test the biggest uncertainties quickly and cheaply. Plan for dependencies, platform requirements and certification from the start.
4. Make progress visible. Use playable builds and short feedback loops to expose problems, enable decisions and keep the team aligned.
5. Define quality through the player’s experience. Set acceptance criteria around what players can do and feel. Test whether the game delivers on its promise.

Keep the End clear.Adapt the Way.Deliver on the promise.

Go deeper

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