Greetings!
For newcomers here is the first post where you can find who I am and why these articles might interest you.
Disclaimer: I’m not going to tell you how to make video games but I will share my experience and learning process of managing an indie team while following the path.
The most important thing about managing a team of 30 employees is having enough time for it, and also support. If I hadn't had the enormous desire to found a development studio with a possibility to spend 3-4 hours every day (w/o weekends) then the team would never exist.
As the leader I spend my time on the following (from high to low priority):
- Employees, their tasks and communication. It’s daily checks of weekly plans, keeping their focus on the most important things iIncluding conversations about video games, news and other relevant topics.
- Urgent tasks: interviews, helping in certain tasks and other unexpected things. Development consists of constant improvised activities, there is always something very urgent and demanding my attention ASAP.
- Accomplishing my personal duties: budget management, presentations, communication. Weekly statuses of development, administration of team calls, editing follow ups. I’m sharing the latter with our PM, hoping to delegate this part soon.
- Planning and strategy. Not on a daily basis but it’s an important part of the job, especially when you get the feeling of walking the wrong path, losing the focus, paying too much attention to inessential things, imagining new features and thinking about how to implement them instead of moving them into the backlog.
What I don’t do for now is:
- Risk evaluation
- Working with NDA
- Working hours regulation
- Complicated analytics and reports
- Following up with competitors and their new titles. But I try to play most of the games in similar genre
Real practice example
During the work on game balance (characters stats), there are 3 people involved. First, we discuss it in our meetups: the elements of the balance, what kind of balance do we want, what design documents do we need, who should write them, what else do we need, how time consuming the process is, etc. All the tasks are written down and moved to Jira. During the first half of our estimated time before deadlines I come to every person involved. I ask how the things are, are there any problems and so on. On the next call we have a status reviewing all the results we’ve got even if it’s still work in progress. We verify again our tasks according to our priorities and milestones. We are likely to postpone the deadlines as it’s almost impossible to set it correctly in the first place. As soon as the actual executor finishes his part I accompany the materials to the next person making sure that they are received in time and all is understood by the recipient. Or I take the results to our next call for the future discussion and then make a decision of approval or further transformation.
This helps me to understand the stage of a feature readiness. How it is created and is there any need to interfere, involve more people on this task, etc.
One head is fine but an additional one makes it even better
Obviously, it’s really hard to keep an eye on everything. Our PM helps me a lot with it. We’ve recently started to do short daily statuses together for 15 minutes. Without unnecessary formalities we discuss current tasks and urgent matters. Along with tracking the tasks in Jira, our PM regulates different administrative questions:
- Creating polls
- Gathering information
- Welcoming new employees
- Organizing additional meetings
- Writing down results and helping all the team to be more efficient
It allows us to keep the focus and double our forces on certain problems without losing sight of less important things.
Required qualities
To lead a team you have to be highly motivated to keep order and systematize everything. You are the one to transform the chaos of game development into something regulated. Well... at the first glance it would look like some Frankenstein thing gathered from anything you could find. But it will bring more clarity, especially for the team. People need to know that the next online meeting is going to happen, that there’s a chosen topic to discuss with the problems to solve, that the results of the meeting will be written down and integrated into the general process. People need to know who to ask for help.
If you have a plan it means you know where you’re going. It doesn’t mean you will get there but there is a destination point everybody is aware of. The leader is the locomotive which drives us there and makes sure nobody is being distracted on the way. The PM rushes between the wagons, cheers people up and sees that nobody drops off, reports back and sometimes defends the team in front of the leader.
This part covers the time from April 2020 to December 2020.
The moral of the story:
It looks like I'm telling obvious things. Especially, for those who have more than one product released with their teams. However, I wish I could know such things from the start. That’s why I’m sharing this.
By the way, we are launching a live-show about our game development work in January 2021. There will be streams of our calls, documents examples, questions & answers sessions and other cool stuff. We are looking forward to helping other indie devs at the beginning of their path. Come check it up!
- Start small. Create the team codex and agree on it with everyone in the team.
- Team building is not just to have a party together. Especially if your team is distributed. It should be about uniting the team by any means.
- You can raise motivation even before getting funding. And secure the shares distribution with legal help.
Summary
- Gathering The Party.
- Our First Game Conference.
- Unfolding The Development.
- Recruitment. 19th October,
- Our Second Game Conference.
- New Acquaintances.
- Rebuilding The Prototype.
- Work In Time Of Pandemic.
- How we hire and ‘fire’ people.
- Funding Our Game: Investors And Publishers.
- Processes And Pipelines.
- Teambuilding.
- Managing The Development Process.
- Features Of Distributed Work.
- How To Keep Going.