Hey everyone! I’m Elif. The game designer of Swaps and Traps, which is an upcoming 2D platformer for PC. This post is about balancing the ups and downs of game development process based on the past three years of our lives with Swaps and Traps.
In addition to being a developer, I’ve also worked as the program manager of a pre-incubation center in Turkey, which supports indie game developers only. My personal experience with hundreds of developers and dozens of teams showed me some common patterns in all of us. Here are the major ones, including how we handled them during the development of Swaps and Traps.
Roadmap
Does your team have a roadmap? Do you all have the same vision? Are you sure if you are all moving forward to the same game?
I’m not just talking about design details. I’m talking about the overall progress.
When you decide to go for it, sit down, have a cup of coffee and have a piece of paper for each team member. Noone else is allowed in this session, it’s important to have the team members only. ;)
Without checking each others’ answers, fill your opinions to below questions:
Our game’s genre is: .................
Our game should probably have ......... hours of gameplay.
A gamer playing our game should feel ...............
We should publish on these platforms: ...................
It should probably take us ............ months to finish our game.
Our team’s strongest quality will probably be: ...........................
Our team may have problems about ....................... but we can solve it by .........................
After answering the above questions, see which ones you agree on, and which ones you think differently. This will walk you through the inital setting of a healthy project. You don’t have to know each detail on your roadmap. But be sure to have one.
Business Partners vs Friends
This is one of the first things you should talk even before you call yourselves a team of developers.
You don’t have to be a corporate entity or a company to have an agreement. You don’t even have to have a team name. But it is important to accept and express that you are all working together with common goals and mutual responsibilities. It just takes a couple of minutes but trust me, it saves years:
Sit down and have a cup of coffee with team members only.
Have a piece of paper. Nothing fancy.
Write down your names and note the things you’ll say below under your name.
Each one of you should tell what you are responsible from. Don’t just say “I’ll design”. Be more descriptive. Prefer: “I’ll be responsible from the overall game design of Swaps and Traps. General design, controls, level design are all on me. But most importantly, I’ll be the one responsible when you all have a question about game’s design. Feel free to ask me to check, fix or decide about all the things under game design.”
Listen to each other. Know how your teammate express her/his responsibility.
Agree on your common rules. Even have keywords for situations. Some examples:
We will not personally take offense at each other’s comments when we talk about the game.
We will not personally attack each other when we talk about the game.
We will warn each other honestly when we get lazy, become nonresponsive or lose track.
We will call “Hamster Dash” whenever we feel like not working. If Hamster Dash is called, we will let each other to take a break.
We are friends, but we will be partners/shareholders/owners/cofounders/whatevers if and only if we fulfil our responsibilities.
When things get rough, it is possible to lose sight of our partnerships. And you won’t of course have a copy of this “agreement” whenever you have a problem. It doesn’t work like that. But this exercise is not about the future. It is about beginnings that set the right direction. You will feel better, communicate better and progress better if you talk to each other and know each others’ expectations. Writing is necessary just to ensure that you won’t cut it short and you all shape the same dough. If you do this, you won’t hesitate to communicate when time comes.
We get mad at each other. We sometimes get angry when one of us delays a task or does the job poorly. But we never let it become a silent issue that just drags all the team down. We talk. Whatever you do, talk. It will solve your situation, but above that it will save your friendship.
I witnessed more than enough teams breaking up, and friends falling apart just because they didn’t talk. They talked to a lot of people, but not to each other. Ego avoids confrontation. We feel exposed. We take it as a personal attack. Take care of this as early as you can, or you might probably end up talking about unfinished games over and over again. I have the perfect exercise for this in the last section. ;)
Tasks from Hell
If you talk to other teams, you will probably learn that they tried different methods and tools to manage tasks. And most of the time none of it works efficiently, or as expected.
You can define deadlines, put milestones, have weekly sprints and daily stand ups. You can use whiteboards, advanced management software, casual apps, stickers on walls.
These are just tools, and will never work if you don’t “manage” the process. We were all working in different full time jobs for the most of Swaps and Traps development. It is highly difficult to keep track of your tasks when you spend most of your day with other things in your mind. But this is the key. Your job is to manage the team, not the tasks. Your priority is to lead the team to the right direction in order to check more tasks on that list.
Here are some tips based on our process:
Deadlines: They are necessary to have a common calendar tempo. You will change them probably, but don’t let that become a loophole. Everyone has a different tempo when working on a project, but the harmony will keep you in sync. That comes from deadlines. Depending of the scope of the game, have weekly deadlines for each team member saying “I’ll finish ................... this week.”
Dailies: If you are working in the same place, then you should have a daily stand up each morning. This is not for you to say “well, it’s the same, you know, whatev...” You should all tell what you finished the day before and what you’ll finish that day. If you feel like this becomes obsolete at some point, you should stop immediately and wear your management hat. You are probably dragging a problem. Is someone in the team not working efficiently? Is someone going through a personal situation? Are you trying to solve a technical problem but don’t have the knowledge for it? Is one of your members waiting for some other task but cannot say it publicly? It can be many things, but you cannot solve it by doing the same daily stand up over and over again. If someone’s daily answer is same for more than three days, it is time to handle the situation and find out what is wrong. If not, your dailies will become boring weeklies where all members get affected. Don’t let that happen. And remember: you are managing the team, supporting each member for the sake of completing the tasks. Focus on the solution, not the problem.
Weeklies: If you are not working in the same place, at least have weeklies. If not at the same place, then do them online. Keep them brief. What have you achieved during the last week. What haven’t you and why? How can you solve that? Don’t let the weekly end before you have a solution plan or a clear roadmap for the following week.
