Written by Happiness+, edited Otakuapologist
An analysis of the hierarchy of Western VN studios
A lot of visual studios are usually pretty small. They typically cap out around 12 people and usually, you only have a few people active on them. But in some cases, where you have dozens of people to onboard and organize. Here in this tutorial, I will explain the typical structure of a larger VN studio. I will start from the bottom.
Developer
Anyone who joins a studio typically lands a dev role where they are responsible for adding a few features: such as art, coding, writing, etc. Typically anyone associated with asset creation or programming is called a developer. There are other roles in a studio like marketing and website creation but those positions aren’t on the frontlines of VN development. So they aren’t relevant to this discussion.
Your average VN dev is clocking around 5-10 hours per week. It’s important to realize that as a developer. It helps to be good at one trade. Writing, Programming, Audio, Art, historically I ran into folk who were jack of all trades types but many of them didn’t excel in one thing. Everyone loves multitasking but that’s not gonna help much here.
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Team Lead
A team is usually 3 or more people who are doing one aspect of the following: art, audio, programming, etc. If a visual novel is getting really big, it helps to have a team of people focusing on one of those key aspects. However, you need someone to lead the team and train new members. Team leads usually report directly to a department director. From my line of work, Watercress created a scripting team. The scripting team is a programming team that handles animations within Ren’py. Scripting isn’t hard but once you’re dealing with 24 scenes, you can have each person do 8 scenes to handle the workload.
Workshopping
Team leads are capable of leading workshops for future developers or for developers to sharpen their skills. It’s a good practice to have regular workshops in between development cycles.
Task and project management
Team leads are familiar with project management. They usually get assigned tasks on Trello or Asana from their department lead with a reasonable deadline. If a developer leaves for personal reasons, they must notify the team lead so the team lead can account for the increase in workload.
Director aka Department Lead
There comes a certain threshold as a studio grows where you might want to manage teams of developers, usually 12-15 people or ⅓-¼ of a studio. It’s not uncommon for a director to drop 10-20 hours per week working. Directors are usually responsible for the following:
Onboarding and Offboarding
It’s usually the responsibility of the director to onboard fresh talent or remove unsatisfactory talent from a studio. Directors can create a whole interview process to filter candidates that trickle down into the studio. When this occurs, it needs to be handled legally. You can’t legally hire anyone under 18 years of age. Be mindful of having folk sign NDAs to work for you. Be mindful of labor laws and practices of your country if you choose to incorporate.
Documentation
A good chunk of time will be spent on writing best practices for your studio. Or writing down important notes from your lessons during each development cycle. Many directors always have certain policies they have to follow. For example, I have GitHub standards documentation at Watercress. There is a policy on how to name GitHub branches. An art director may have a policy on how to name art assets for the programmers. Another purpose behind these documents is to establish a continuum between past, present, and future directors to ensure best practices to maintained throughout the studio’s lifetime. If a director leaves and they take their skills with them, the studio needs a backup plan to ensure quality.
Budget and resource allocation
Directors at volunteer studios don’t have to worry about budgets. However, they do have to worry about the allocation of time and labor for certain features or systems. Time is money after all. A director usually gets approval from their executive on either hourly limits, budget, etc. In a for-profit studio, a director will be given a budget to handle their aspect of visual novel development. It’s within a director’s power to move a team from one feature such as animation to optimization depending on the needs of the project.
Watercress Studios business Info:
Requirements gathering
Before the actual development begins, writers and project leadership will create a document that will have a set of requirements. Typically these are called design documents. It is the responsibility of a director to handle what systems and features can be implemented, especially given the time, labor, and financial constraints of the project. They will relay this to the team leads accordingly. Historically, writers will ask all the other asset departments with sky-high requests. The directors will negotiate down what is possible. There is a middle ground that gets approved before the development begins.
A good example is a Renpy email system where you see an animated webm of each character sending the email. Such a feature will most likely get watered down to where you don’t get an animated avatar but a simple chibi. Directors must know the strengths and weaknesses of their whole department for this to work.
It’s not uncommon for a director to be more hands-on, in fact, I am usually hands-on with some feature implementation at Watercress. But these next roles aren’t as hands-on anymore.
Executive aka Studio Leadership
Honestly, for a 60-person studio, you only need 1-2 executives. Anything more it becomes more of a dilution of the term executive and it could incur more legal paperwork than necessary. So for the time being, let’s assume you have a studio CEO with just a handful of directors. A CEO is the final boss of the VN studio in a sense. The only people they report to are the board, donors, etc. The responsibilities of a CEO are:
Funding
CEOs mainly spend most of their time, getting money either through Kickstarter, loans, or some grants. They have to raise funds to pay for the whole development cycle. Historically, CEOs would try to share but many devs hate that. The rev share idea has slowly died since many VNs aren’t that profitable from the offset.
Human Resources
CEOs are also responsible for handling conflict management if there isn’t an HR person at the studio already. Human resources are usually an interdepartmental affair. That allows for some level of flexibility for the leadership to handle the problem as professionally as possible.
Accounting
They have to manage the accounting if they are a for-profit studio. Many visual novel studios typically have budgets of $5-15k. If you’re hiring developers at 5-10 hours a week for a 3-6 or 9-12 month dev cycle. You need to account for that in the necessary accounting.
Legal
When it comes to the founding paperwork, applying for government grants, NDAs, Employment agreements, and non-competes, Studio Leadership is responsible for it all. Of course, laws will vary from nation to nation.
Donors and/or Investors
This is the highest tier of VN studio management. These folks create the mission for the company. They write the constitution of the studio.
Assuming your VN isn’t volunteer and you got money from certain individuals. They are the main people who drive the VN. VN projects live or die based on money. Historically, the donors are the main people looking at and judging the executives for everything. If a Kickstarter fails, it’s the leadership’s fault.
In typical business, the board is made up of principal shareholders who have the highest stakes in the company. They can vote to remove the current CEO or just replace the whole studio leadership if necessary.
Donors
In the case of donors, the situation can get murky if a CEO were to be negligent in their business. Usually, studio leadership would step down if a project were to get mishandled to such a degree. In the case of Black Sakura, there was a Kickstarter that went well, but afterward, the studio CEO, Sek, left. The circumstances surrounding his leave are complex, but they aren’t uncommon.
Studio leadership should always be in constant contact with their donors. If there is a crowdfunding campaign. The leadership organizes weekly or monthly development updates. The goal is to ensure transparency and therefore, accountability. Failing a Kickstarter campaign can also ruin the brand of the company and make it harder to secure funding for future projects.
Investors and/or The Board of Directors
The studio leadership regularly holds meetings with their funders at least a few times a year. The goal is to review performance on VN development, changes in revenue, bring up new issues, etc. Investors typically hold a very hands-off approach to studio management. However, may do the following:
Guidance and Expertise: Investors, especially those with industry experience, may offer strategic advice and insights that can help the studio navigate the market.
Exit Strategy: They are often interested in understanding and influencing the company’s exit strategy, which could include a sale, merger, or initial public offering (IPO).
Networking Opportunities: Investors can provide connections to other industry players, potential partners, or additional funding sources.
Market Insights: Sharing knowledge about market trends, consumer preferences, and competitive dynamics that can influence the studio’s strategy.
In conclusion
VN studio comes in shapes or sizes. The name of the game is to drop a VN. However, if you’re making a large VN, you may need a large team. Typically VN studios are a lot more low-maintenance than typical game development houses but the rules still apply. Without any organization, it’s really hard to make any VN at all. This article shows how VN studios could be at a massive scale, but feel free to work at a smaller studio if the needs are suitable. Thank you.
