Edy Zahid Blog The Thoughts of One Game Developer

One Year Review Working In A Game Dev Team

15 December 2010 marks one year for me working on a game development team on a Flash RPG game called Math Quest. Although I don't learn much in term of technical skill, I learn a lot in term of people skill - how to appropriately interact and manage people which is the essential skill I need to master if I want to manage game dev team and run a game dev company in the future.

For a year, I observe the whole team how they carry out their duties and analyzing their effectiveness to find ways on how to improve their performance. The result is several important rule of conduct or practices that I believe if applied in any game dev team will improve the overall performance of the team.

Project Manager

Every game dev team need a decisive project manager who almost ruthless in execution which will allow the whole team to move forward according to the plan. Project manager or producer is the mastermind for any game dev team which assign tasks and responsibilities to team members and he has to make sure EVERY team member perform according to the plan or else there will be delay in development time. Since delay in development time costs money, he need to provide whatever motivation, support or even slight intimidation needed for team member to carry out their task.

For me there's no better motivation than rewarding team member who match or even exceed expectation with monetary value or some other perks that excites the team member. This is why it is important for project manager to be given budget allocation so he can manage the money to allocate to team member and do necessary adjustment if thing does not work according to the plan.

I've found out than reducing salary or allowance for team member adversely affect their performance so project manager need to take this into consideration if he want to follow this strategy. I always believe that people should be properly rewarded according to their productivity. If they perform well, reward them properly because that's the essential element of happy employee. Happy employee bring productivity to the company.

Does female can handle project manager job? She can if she can exhibits aura of decisive in her attitude and she needs the ability to exhibits positive influence on team members. Otherwise, forget about it because I don't like working with indecisive project manager even if she does look like Jessica Alba

Game Designer

Every game dev team need a leader so that position can only be filled by a knowledgeable game designer who knows almost everything about the game project. He must be passionate about the game and should have the habit of writing any details about the game on paper or digital format so the whole team member can refer to it if they want to know any details about the game. I think the most important skill game designer should have is analytical skill which is the ability to come out with practical solution for any problem faced during development time. To have this kind of ability, he should have a broad knowledge and to be able to apply these knowledge to come out with many solutions.

Game designer position is equivalent to movie director position which allow him the ability and burden to make a lot of decision so in order to make that decision, he has to know necessary details. Sometimes the details comes from programmer. He need to consult programmer whether certain feature in the game can be implemented or not.

From my experience, game designer almost always think the grandest idea and feature he can think of and it is the job of programmer to provide some sort of reality check for him. Most of time the idea or feature will be rescaled so programmer can implement it. This is why experience is important because experienced game designer will know the limit that can be pushed because he has seen the whole implementation before.

Game designer should have excellent writing skill because most of game details are written. The ability to write in concise is very important to minimize confusion among team member if they want to refer to game details.

Communication Flow

Project manager and game designer has to keep open the channel of communication flow at most of the time so team member can communicate to them if there's been a problem. This means to keep open Google Talk/Yahoo Messenger and switch on phone most of the time. Sometimes it is frustrated for team member to try to contact project manager/game designer but he isn't on Google Talk/Yahoo Messenger and worse switch off the phone. Game development progress will be delayed because of this communication setback.

I've found out that eventually there's bound to be dissatisfaction between team members so allocating a place and certain time to discuss the problem can prove to be an effective way. This is where every team member will highlight any concern or dissatisfaction they have to each other and find ways on how to solve it. Dissatisfaction if not properly handled can lead to bigger problem which will somehow cripple the performance of the team.

I also find out that it is much more motivated for me if I can keep track of other team member workload so I know what they are doing at certain time. This gives me urge to work harder compared to me wondering what certain team member is doing right now. This can be achieved by having the whole team member gather for a brief 15 minutes session every morning so they can share what they've been doing yesterday and what they intend to do for the rest of the day.

If physical session isn't possible, team member can update their work load progress every morning through Twitter so other team member can follow the update.

Conclusion

I've been a lone wolf for several years so adapting my work flow and attitude to fit within the team takes times. Is it worthwhile working in a team? That's a tough question to answer because I've found out that in order to produce something great and special, you have to need a team of multiple talent. There's so much a single game developer can do and their limited capabilities will be reflected on their work. I've been on this path, my friend.
In term of game development, a good interdependence among team member most of the time produce much better result than the best independent game developer working on his own.