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I'm looking more for high level role such as producer/manager of the group making the tools for a content pipeline. This would be for a large AAA studio.

Also what kinds of tools are they creating?

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3 Answers 3

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Production management or technical management skills, or both, depending -- and experience.

Some studios don't clearly differentiate between production (in this context I mean the scheduling and pipelining of tasks across each internal team, assisting in bug triage and balancing, ensuring all team dependencies are satisfied, that your schedule is accurate and that you are trending towards ship) management and technical management (which I mean to be more about the architecture of the in-code systems that implement the tools), and so you'll probably need both, or at least to be focusing on whichever one of those interests you more. That kind of role is almost always sourced internally, though (i.e., by promoting existing programmers or producers) so your best bet is to get an entry level position in the approximate area you're interested in and work your way up.

Studios with dedicated tools teams generally have those teams because they require tools that are unique to their product's production goals, and so they're usually not building the same thing except in very general terms -- usually tools revolve around asset/content creation, management, and tracking. Especially with large, AAA titles tracking/reporting/metrics concerning content and content production can be extremely important due to the shear volume of data.

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If you have to ask what kind of tools they are creating, then you won't be able to go straight into a job like that. That's if such a group exists, of course - not everywhere has dedicated tooling departments, and even if they do, they don't necessarily have a separate manager for that department (since most of the technology will be shared with the game developers).

I would expect the typical route into such a role would be to start as a tools programmer and be promoted up to a supervisory position.

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I'd expect the primary requirement would be experience, if not specifically of the role you want at least some relevant game development / management experience. Have you tried looking around for available positions and seeing what skills they say are important?

Tools could be anything from basic texture converters to complex game editors that let the designers create the game like the Unreal Editor.

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