The crazy Texans who run Phenix Rising and the Armadillo Podcast (an iTunes favorite of ours) conducted a short interview with celebrity games producer Richard “Lord British” Garriot, covering his penchant for haunted houses and talking about his upcoming MMOFPS for NCsoft, Tabula Rasa. Richard is probably most well-known for creating Ultima, the epic and influential RPG as well as for sometimes getting up on stage during performances of Riverdance.

[Interview with Richard Garriot | Richard Garriot @ Wikipedia]

activeCollab is an extremely powerful and open-source project management and collaboration tool, providing the lightweight or indie game developer with free and extremely powerful project management, defect tracking, collaboration, and communication tools to aid in their development process. Requiring PHP5 and MySQL, activeCollab is a web-based alternative which is easy to install and extremely easy to use, with no limitation on the number of projects (per-project permissions), clients or team members. Currently in an alpha-state, activeCollab is already looking to be a solid solution for small studios looking to support open-source software for their project needs.

activeCollab

Gamasutra has recently published an excellent beginners article from Mark Mencher, founder of GameRecruiter.com and formerly of Microprose, 3DO and Spectrum Halobyte. In it, he introduces the role of games producer and covers quite a bit of what is needed to actually gain the position of games producer and the qualities needed to be an effective games producer / project manager.

So you want to be a producer @ Gamasutra | GameRecruiter.com