Thursday, August 26th, 2021

<aside> 👋 **Happy Thursday and welcome to today's AMA with @Lazlo, who have generously agreed to spend the next hour with us answering questions about their open Producer role 📣

Lazlo, thank you so much for being here and sharing your insights with the Work With Indies community! While I let you introduce yourself, let me share the Steam page for your beautiful upcoming game, Été.**

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Make sure you wishlist Été on steam!

<aside> 🇨🇦 Lazlo: Hi everyone! Thanks for having me! So yup, my name's Lazlo, I'm the founder and creative director over at Impossible, a small indie studio based in Montreal. We are crafting a very unique game called Été, an exploration game where you play as a wandering painter who discovers a city with their paintbrush, and we're currently looking for a producer.

I'm also a Unity tools developer operating under the publisher called "Ludiq", which is more famously known for Bolt (now acquired as Unity Visual Scripting) and Peek.

Some links: My personal Twitter: https://twitter.com/lazlobon Studio Twitter: https://twitter.com/impossible_dev Studio website: https://impossible.dev/

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<aside> 🖌️ What convinced your team it was time to hire a producer? - Chris

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<aside> 🇨🇦 Lazlo: Good question, I should clarify! We wanted to work with a producer from day 1 and we did. A producer was my first ever hire on Été. Unfortunately, after a bit more than a year of collaborating with our former producer, we had to let him go. Long story short, COVID made work-life balance very hard to maintain for him and he wasn't able to carry on as many responsibilities as we needed. So we're now looking for someone to jump in mid-project.

I've had the chance of working with wonderful producers/project managers in previous roles in my life and I know how they can entirely uplift a team and make everyone's life easier, so it's definitely a role I value a lot as part of a team from the get-go.

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<aside> 🖌️ I guess the first question I have is the role you are looking to fill. Is it for an experienced game producer? Or are you looking for someone who may be jr and looking to learn and grow in the role? - The_Ginger_Sheep

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<aside> 🇨🇦 Lazlo: Our ideal candidate has "gone through the motions" at least once, meaning having shipped 1 title, no matter the scale. This is because we're going to head into a release year in 2022 with all that entails (QA, cert, platform holders, loc, etc.) and we don't have in-house experience with this.

That being said, I worded the job posting to focus mainly on the "qualities" of a candidate, because in my book any organized and determined person can make a good producer, regardless of specific industry experiences. This is also why our salary range is so wide (50-90k$): for a junior candidate who shows potential up to a more mid-career producer with more experience.

Also, we've worked with juniors so far who have exceeded all our expectations, so we're definitely open to seeing someone grow with us. It may be a steep learning curve considering the amount of responsibilities though.

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<aside> 💡 Editor's Note: Love this! As it is rare, it is so very encouraging when we hear of indie developers creating space for junior employees and giving them opportunities to grow.

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<aside> 🖌️ With the possibility of remaining remote post-pandemic, does this include the entire team as well? Will there still be a physical office in the future? - Katherine

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<aside> 🇨🇦 Lazlo: We actually haven't settled on office vs WFH in the long term yet! I consider this to be a team-wide decision and we'll definitely have an open and democratic decision about it.

When we started production on this project, we were in GamePlay Space, a coworking space for indies in Montreal with about ~150 devs. For obvious reasons, it shut down pretty fast with the pandemic. In fact, we were only there for about a month before we had to leave. So the entire production far was done in WFH and we've found our workflow and cruising speed. We're totally happy & functional in WFH as it is, but I know there are more socialite/extroverted people on the team who miss the human interactions.

For this role, we accept candidates who would be purely remote, even outside Montreal, as long as they are Canadian (due to Canada Media Fund constraints) and within +1 or -1 hour of the Eastern time zone.

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