Small Teams, Big Dreams: How to Build a Small Team to Do Great Things

[Music] hi everyone thanks for coming um so I'm Simon Oliver I'm the founder of hand circus for a small independent Studio based in London uh and the focus of my talk today is really just working out how you can do a lot with a little so we're small team core team of only four uh and most recently we created seab beard um which launched last year uh which is a large scale freetop playay Adventure title um it's absolutely huge and this talk is really about how we did that uh it's also co-written by Ben Christ so Ben Christie is our technical lead um so he's really helped contribute and shape the Talk itself as well so a little bit of background about us we're kind of from iPhone prehistory so way back when uh the iPhone was very much embryonic um started playing around with a few ideas for the iPhone this is way back in 2007 when there wasn't an iOS SDK um and then we launched our first game orando with ngim Moko in 2008 so we started off from Paid iOS uh we then transitioned um to do a paid PS3 game called oko um which was a much much

larger undertaking uh and then most recently we've come back to iOS but now taking a look at free to play uh with CID um which as I said launched in December so in terms of our overall history this is generally a an approximate graph of what we've been trying to do so we didn't really want to grow big the idea wasn't to have a huge team but we wanted to take on these increasingly ambitious projects um so in order to do that we obviously had to figure out how we can do that with our relatively small resources so we've had some successes the early days were you know amazing we were very lucky with our timing we had an app that was um was just designed for the iPhone early on when there weren't 600 new games being released every day um but we also made some mistakes so yeah it hasn't always been plain sailing um and I want to be pretty candid with the things that went wrong along the way as well so in terms of the structure of the talk um starting off just really talking about configuration and composition so how you build a team how you work with Partners what kind of team members you're looking for um and yeah really

how to construct the composition of the team when you're working on a project then focusing on efficiency working at how you can re blockages working out how you can prevent wastage and really making sure that resources you have get put to best use and then finally I'm going to start talking about empowerment so really how you can Empower your team members what tools you can give them um how you can build a culture that allows them to thrive and really just enable to work at their Peak capability um but this isn't really you know a sweatshir talk it's not about efficiency see at all cost it's not about ringing every last ounce out of your employee it's really about how to do it in a productive way in a positive way how to make sure the team are just enabled and can produce you know amazing things that they can be proud of and really enjoying that kind of high level of work so starting off with Team structure really just how you can that wasd uh yes so really how you can structure the team itself um so first of all yeah so there's obviously a balance when you're choosing the team members for your team whether you go for core team or whether you go for contract now I'm not trying

to be too disparaging about contractors there I was a contractor for a while and it was a really valuable experience and sometimes they can be the absolute right foot for the job um so yeah I think you know if you're building at your team there's a lot of considerations you really need to make because there's pros and cons as to whether or not you have somebody in the core permanent member or whether they're a contractor so first of all if they are a court team member obviously they have a much greater sense of ownership this is their game um they're not just proud of one small part that they contribute to it's their overall game and they want it to succeed and they want it to be great um so that's you know a huge motivational Factor when you're working on a game um is to be part of the team that did them um secondly knowledge retention as well um I think this is really interesting thing there was a great article in energ magazine about the culture at Nintendo how Nintendo managed to just maintain this extremely high level of quality and it's because generally people don't leave they tend to stay there for a huge amount of time and like the the team that made warrier where um I think a lot of them were in their 60s and they've been in tendo over 20 30 years and obviously that creates this incredibly healthy library of knowledge it means when a new starter

joins they can just tap into that and just absorb that Knowledge from other team members whereas if you go for contractor obviously the moment they leave all the knowledge that they've acquired can no longer be passed on um also it tends to attract top tier Talent you know people generally want to be part of something um there are exceptions to that and there's obviously certain specializations where that doesn't really apply but generally people that want to be part of a great team work with other amazing people um so you will attract you know great people if you're looking for a core team member also financially it's better long-term value um obviously freelance rates tend to be a little bit higher than the equivalent you'd pay a course salary because they will end up having to manage the uncertainty and the fact they're not always going to get work so better long-term value Cy member but on the negative side utilization obviously you need to make sure these people that are working to you full-time you need to make sure they actually have something to do that's productive and as actually part of your core objectives rather than just them you know just keeping busy doing something um long-term commitment as well obviously when you take somebody on full-time you have to support them and make sure that they they have um you know stability and they are a full employee um so yeah that's something you

need to consider um and also there's a project fit risk if you get somebody that's a little bit too specialized um you want to make sure that they can join you for multiple projects um otherwise if you have somebody that has a very very distinct bespoke art style that might be great you know for the gothic horror game that you're making when you move into doing something that's completely different maybe a stylized cartoon game or space game you know they're not going to fit necessarily so there's a risk there you want to find someone that is going to work with you effectively across multiple projects the benefits of a contractor conversely specialist you can find somebody that is the very best at what it is that they do and that is most applicable for your project so for example we work with um a couple of contractors internationally we work with a character riger was based in barus an animator as she was based in Israel and we had the opportunity to go through poly count forums and concept art.org and look for people that just nailed the kind of look that we were looking for um and that's a huge benefit it means that you can really cherry-pick people are ideal for that particular role also flexibility you know this is great the fact that you can um have somebody for two weeks obviously depending on the way that you negotiate

the way you work together you could potentially have them for two weeks it can be a bit of a lull bring them back say actually I need some last minute help need a couple of days here and there and that flexibility is just ideal because again it really minimizes wastage again yes so tying into specialization you can find someone that is the perfect project fit in terms of their style in terms of what it is that you're doing the platform you're targeting and that's extremely beneficial but you do have availability risk you know if you do have somebody that joins you for 6 weeks and then you need them for another couple of weeks four weeks later all of a sudden they could be working on some else they may not have availability so that's something you need to manage um and again conversely with the benefits of full-time team members there's knowledge loss that knowledge working on your particular um aspect of your project something they're building if that knowledge disappears um and you need that knowledge later on that's a huge loss and they're obviously more expensive as well so yeah that's um some to take consideration um but there are other opportunities um this is my favorite piece of Cosplay ever this is somebody going as every Johnny Depp

uh but you can go for a hybrid role so you can go for something where you can have contractors with kind of slight additional benefits or other aspects to it so for example um one of the things we did for our second um well our third game for OKO was to establish a bonus pot the idea was that if the game does well the profits from the game will be shared between everyone even if they're a contractor and there's something I know another few other Studios do so tiger style the guys did the awesome spider on iOS I believe they operate under a s similar model so it means you get a few of the benefit of a core team member um but some of the flexibility and other benefits of a contractor um it's not a um perfect solution well it has some benefits it wasn't really ideal for us um because you lose some of the most important elements like ownership that's a real key consideration um but you know there's other different industries that work in in other ways as well so for example the way that the film model works it's not too dissimilar to the way that we work is have a core team that works across multiple projects um so this would be maybe a director the guy that owns the production company you might producer

somebody that works across all the projects themselves um and then when you go into pre-production you bring on Specialists you bring on perhaps a production designer cinematographer people that are right for this particular project and then when you move into full production you expand you bring on contractors you bring on actors everyone that really um you know composes the full team and this is I think something quite similar to the way we work and we find pretty well ourselves so the questions to ask yourself first of all do you have enough work for a full-time role is this something that you really need over the full length of the project or would it be better to do somebody just to come in and work for a couple of months secondly should the knowledge acquired be retained in house is this vle knowledge this this core to your business is this something you need to retain for future projects and in order to maintain the project itself um also is this role only required in this project you know it might be that you making an audio game and then after that you've got no intention to ever do a music based game again in which case it makes no sense to hire somebody that's a music specialist for this particular game um would a specialist of the perfect fit be better than a gemus in this case so yeah would it be better to find somebody that is just doing the most beautiful gothic art

rather than hire somebody that's you know pretty good at that but um yeah isn't really ideal so for us this is the way that Rand one and two were structured give or take um so I was the only um permanent team member um moiko was Bor as a contractor but incentivized so he had um yeah bonuses related to perform of the game um and the musician we worked with J you guys fans of Nune we worked with Mr Scruff and basically just had the opportunity to go and cherry pick favorite Mr Scruff tracks which was amazing um and ngie moko o helped facilitate bringing in a contract program that really helped taking my terrible code and turning into something that actually worked on the device um and this excludes some of the roles in Nim Moka obviously as the publisher they had a number of other um team members that worked on the project and really helped assisist in launching the game and and making it a commercial success so this is the structure for okobo so this is the one that we self-published um so I was again the only permanent team member but all of the others had hybrid roles so again incentivized um by a share of the profits um this game was a disaster um

it was very um it just went very very badly wrong I was trying to take on too much myself so taking on um the responsibilities of actually publishing as well as directing the game I had too much going on in terms of the roles that I was trying to take on um and also the with the exception of the level designer um he was the only one that was working 5 days a week so the others were split between other elements of work so again it really kind of dissolved any sense of ownership and made it made it far far worse so don't have a team structure like this ever this is just like a complete nightmare um so yeah that really wasn't as successful um but now we've learned from that and now really restructured things quite differently for card so we have four core team members myself um 3D artist um our art director moo and our Tech lead Ben and so they've all been brought on as permanent team members and that's really helped build up a much stronger sense of ownership um we also have a number of um specialist roles some were maybe for a few weeks some were for 3 months um and I think probably the longest there was a level designer Island designer um and he

joined us for about six months um but yeah so this really just allowed us to have that flexibility while also keeping the core team Compact and really focused on what they needed to do so we had no hybrid roles in this particular case U but tying into that role blending I think this is something that you know anybody working on a small project is aware of this you end up having people that do multiple different roles sometimes too many different roles um but I love this idea of um a a coin termined by a guy that worked for an agency called Ideo I did a little bit of freelancing um for Ido in London and I was really impressed the way their the the companies run the corporate culture um of the studio um and this guy Tim Brown coined this idea of a t-ship team member um so the idea is that they are amazing at one thing they're specialists in one particular area but they have an appetite for cross-disciplinary work so they like working with other people in the teams I'm just going to read you a little quote from uh Tim Brown here t-shaped people have two kinds of characteristics hence the use of the letter T to describe them the vertical stroke of a te is depth of skill that allows them to contribute to the creative process that can be from any number of different fields the horizontal stroke of the tea is

disposition for collaboration across disciplines it is composed of two things first empathy it's important because it allows people to imagine the problem from another perspective to stand in somebody else's shoes second they tend to get very enthusiastic about other people's disciplines to the point they may actually start to practice them t-shaped people have both depth and breadth in their skills so again this is awesome this is just the kind of person that you want to have on your team somebody that is passionate about the other things that people are doing they're curious about them and really wants to delve in to collaborate with other people on your team this doesn't mean jack of all trades so this doesn't mean somebody that's like not that great a whole bunch of things um it means people that are awesome at one or two things or maybe even three things but they have this passion and this enthusiasm for the other disciplines that make up the um the team itself so benefits of Ro blending um so obviously utilization this is great you know if somebody isn't needed for a particular role or a particular time on the project it means that they can potentially take on um other elements so for example they might help with

Community Management it might be that there's an artist who's curious about level design um and obviously you know they may not have you know the same level of expertise as a specialist it means that it really helps kind of smooth things out if there's a little bit of um kind of position in the in the schedule where they're not needed it also improves collaboration you know you naturally get that thing I'm sure of you would experience that thing where you get two people that just really R into each other's disciplines really pushing each other and trying to um come up with new ways to work together to innovate to find you know really push the projects somewhere new so it really improves collaboration um and it alleviates boredom you know especially if you're working on a long project so for us C was around 2 and a half years um it alleviates boredom it means that the people get given something else to do which is great you know it means that they can try their hand at something else um spices things up a little bit that means when they come back they're a little bit fresher to work on what is their C specialization um but there are some negatives so it can be a little bit less efficient somebody that is a specialist is obviously going to work more efficiently than somebody that is you know doing this as a kind of secondary um element to their profession something

that they're passionate about but not necessarily as experienced um it can reduce healthy tension so this is something that I really experienced particularly with OKO when you're working on a project when you have to inhibit multiple roles that have different responsibilities you get to a position where if it's a really serious important issue and you're having to kind of have the two sides of the argument in your head it's nowhere near as good as having two people actually arguing it out discussing it out so say for example if um you have a creative director who's trying to push the project and make it as ambitious and exciting and amazing as possible you have somebody that's in charge of the finances for the project as well obviously trying to make sure that it's brought in within budget um and if and if you have that inhibited in the same head you're not going to have a realistic discussion as to you know all the different aspects of the project so it can be pretty risky because it reduces that healthy tension that you really want to have in a team also there's a context PCH penalty um this is something I've seen discussed quite a bit here at GDC this week um when you have you know a mental model in your head You' really built it up and you've really invested a lot of time in in taking this on for complicated tasks um when you're switching over to

something else it's a completely different mindset completely different discipline um it takes time and it takes a little bit of time to kind of move from one to the other so you want to make sure that if you are context switching you're not doing it every 5 minutes every hour maybe you can try and split you know days up or have different days when you're working between different disciplines so questions to ask yourself when you're planning out you know the role blending you're going to have on your team does the work require specialist knowledge you know is there something that's better suited to somebody that is amazing at this um and I guess tied into that you know do you have um should this be broken out into a separate role and I guess you know are are the people on the team actually wanting to take on this it might be there are people there that are relatively t-shaped but that tea does not go anywhere near into the the discipline that you're trying to um find skill for and could the lack cross tension crossr tension cause issues again like I was saying earlier that can be a really dangerous thing if you are trying to solve challenging issues and you're trying to resolve this all in your head without getting it out and and reasoning so to give you an example of the RO Landing that we had for seab

Beard um these are the four different cor members of the team uh so Ben his primary role was technical lead he was also doing Network programming he was a server engineer um ux designer as well so really kind of helping build out the UI and experiment with making that as efficient as possible and he designed a number of the mini games for the sailing that we have in the game as well um and he really relished the chance to you know to mix things up a little bit I think the nice thing is all the other roles here genuinely came from a place of enthusiasm from each of them so hi our 3D artist also started doing level design so we had a contractor that was doing the level design for the islands in the game he was with us for about 6 months and then we had a gap as we were moving towards the end of production we needed to rework a few Island um designs and I jumped in and and was a natural you know he he called it um like playing Minecraft really enjoyed just the challenge of using the level design tools to to experiment and create art in a different way so moo our art director also did all the concept art for the game the UI design for the game as well as handling a lot of the marketing materials um as a graphic artist as well uh myself as game director I was also um in charge of running the business a kind

of business administration uh I was also the producer that's probably the biggest mistake I made we tried to hire um a producer and didn't work out sadly um for the project but I think that was a massive overhead on my part and really was a distraction from um the other aspects of the game so that's the one role if I could have broken that into sear Ro that would have been producer U but also doing game design and before Ben joined I was doing programming uh so yeah another part of that Partners so you know certainly in most cases for all of our projects we've had um partners and they come in many different shapes and sizes um so when you're choosing whether or not you're going to partner with somebody there's a number of different factors in this and a number of different types of Partners um so it really depends on your project your team and what it is you're looking to get out of a project so motivation for partnering obviously money is probably one of the biggest ones in most cases so that can be money for development um although obviously uh if you're working on a free to play game it also includes money for marketing and UA I mean generally includes money for marketing anyway um it may be you know it's become increasingly challenging if you're group Step Studio to actually be able to afford to do this yourself um so there

are companies out there that are just specializing in just purely doing the UA aspect of it as well um distribution you know obviously this becoming less and less of an issue the actual getting things into the hands of people isn't really a problem anymore but it used to be an issue if you wanted to get a slot on say X or PSN you needed to work with a publisher that had those slots certainly if you going into retail this wasn't generally something you could do yourself but just becoming less of an issue although that's now transferring more into audience and Discovery so if you work with a partner that has pre-existing audience obviously that's a huge Advantage they're able to cross promote through the network um and they're able to Aid in Discovery they probably a lot of experience in terms of getting um your game out there um and resources as well so beyond money um it might be that they have you know an expert a crack um you know team around monetization um it might be that they have some amazing technology that you know you really want to you know tackle so it might be that you're working with somebody producing Hardware it might be that you're working with somebody that has you know um fluid dynamics engine that you really want to they really want to um harness and

they're looking for people to collaborate with on a game um so the questions to ask yourself when you are planning out your um whether or not to work with a partner so obviously a key part of this you're trading revenue for resources so you need to work out whether or not this trade is a good trade what are you getting back for it is it a good spend um obviously in some cases you may not have the budget to do this yourself so it's kind of a moot point but it's definitely worth having a think about whether or not this is something that you want to go for um um in some cases it might be more efficient for you to procure the resources directly it might be better off for you to build out a team doing that particular skill set um it may not be um and again it also really just might come down to whether or not it's something that you want to do yourselves you know do you have any interest in building out a UA team do you have any interest in building out a QA team um or marketing team internally um you know certainly from from my side when we started working on Orlando this wasn't something that I had a lot of experience in and it's not something I had a lot of passion in um and so you know with early conversations with NG Moko just naturally took that direction of um of

it felt like a partnership where it was quite symbiotic and that's something where you really want where there's not as much overlap but it's very complimentary um so if you're not that interested um in what it is that they could provide then it probably um makes sense you know to to find that out to work with a partner on that um yeah and lastly is is value generated by working together it might be that you know the collaboration of the two different companies um produce something greater than some of its parts um so yeah really I guess you'll naturally when you start you know working and talking with potential Partners you'll immediately get an idea of whether or not um this is going to be a you know a fruitful solution so for hand circus we started off as I mentioned earlier we started off working um with NG Moko for Rando 1 and Rando 2 um we ended up self-publishing for OKO so handling yeah all aspects of the submission aspects of QA localization and that was yeah as I mentioned before a nightmare and was way too much of a stretch and as a result the product suffered we weren't able to get it to the point we wanted because you know quite simply ran out of money and we ran out of um yeah resources to

get it launched um and then most recently we' working with backflip Studios on seab beard and again going to specialist in freeto play really helped us just you know get the game to Market and and help it be a success so now moving on to efficiency um so really how you can make the most of what you have and make sure that there's no wastage with resources that you have um and one of the first parts of this is utilization you want to make sure that there's no gaps there you know in a really poorly laid out Tetris style way there's no gaps there where the blocks have stacked and there's no way you can get that used um but to be clear utilization is not keeping everyone busy business has no intrinsic value you want to make sure that everyone is working on furthering established goals um so obviously you need to communicate what those goals are but there's no point having somebody sitting there just you know just busily going off in their own Direction um and that doesn't mean you can't have you know more open goals so for example you know Google 10% time having something where it's much more open-ended of you know create something that has some kind of relevance to what it is that you do or you know if you're a downtime work on Improvement the tools but it's not about keeping everyone busy

uh and obviously utilization becomes harder as the team grows to tesate all those different resources effectively and making sure there's no gaps is much harder um and so yeah this is especially pronounced when you're talking about multi-team obviously multi team has some advantages and that you can actually start moving resources from Team to team but yeah it becomes um an increasingly complex problem so yeah there's some additional challenges around this so obviously when you're moving between projects um it's hard because generally the early part of the project the team is going to be smaller if you're working in pre-production and if you're a single Studio single team Studio that's incredibly challenging um and it becomes more challenging as I mentioned earlier if we work on a multiple project simultaneously I mean there are some changes that are coming in terms of the way that we make games that are making this a little bit easier so living games games of service um has a different shape in terms of the product lifetime um so obviously when you launch the game the next um you know few months the next years you know after that um generally it turns out to be pretty steady the work that you're going to be doing it's not like classic game where you kind of launch the game then you're back down to

you know maybe doing patch release but nothing really substantial the nice thing about this is that the revenue should hopefully be stable or going up and it means you can keep that team stable um another option is to go for what we've done here compact core team where it means that you can just grow and Shrink grow and Shrink primarily by working with contractors that you need um on a basis so questions to ask yourself around this are you able to utilize all your team efficiently is this something you have a plan for is this something you're able to um create a plan for also do you have a plan to overflow work if any team member completes their work so can you have some secondary objectives that they can move on to um once their work is completed so it means you're not constantly having a thing how can I make that guy work there how is she going to be able to do something constructive um so yeah those are two questions I think can really help guide you in terms of um your utilization so this is roughly how we were structured over the time of the project so to start with it was just myself and moo um working on the project we then took on our 3D artist and we started working with our level designers this is really we were prototyping exploring the game and working at what

the game was really about uh so the nice thing is at this stage we're relatively compact our burn rate was relatively low so that we could experiment we could fail we could try things before we ended up going into production when we went into production you can see it starts to spike working with lots of different contractors so that as you can see the spike isn't as prolonged you know it moves down a little bit during production there was some roles like the music the music was finished about a year before we launched um a lot of the writing was done um you know relatively early on then our writer Dan came back to help kind of you know wrap things up later on in production U but again the the benefits of working with Freelancers allowed us to just have that kind of Spike and it back down again and now we're in the post launch phase we're again it's essentially just um just the core team maintaining the game pushing out updates pushing out new content so next we talk a little bit about communication um and how that can drive efficiency for the project um and one of the most important parts of this is Vision making sure that there's a shared ownership of that vision and that you communicated what that vision is um and that also goes down to explain to people why the work they're doing is important and how that forms a part um

of yeah the objectives and how that fits into the larger goal um and you inside into that you really want to make sure that people can be candid about you know any reservations they have about the work if they don't understand why it fits in they don't understand what they should be doing um they're not going to be great you know if if they if they don't believe in what it is they're doing then it's it's never going to work and obviously you know that requires just you know effort to make sure that that you're listening to them and to make sure that they their understanding and you're clear about your communication as to why they're doing this if they don't understand why they're building you know the emotional model for this guinea pig and this particular farm simulator they're doing they don't think it will contribute to the overall product itself you need to explain to them why why it's important and why it does that and I think that will really help motivate them and help them produce good work and understand how it fits into the overall project um and obviously this is you know much more of a case for core team members less over contractors contractors generally it can be um kind of a little bit less less emphasis there in terms of making sure they understand um vision of the project but you certainly need to communicate how their part will fit in to what you're doing um meetings again tens communication

meetings can be a real efficiency Kutter um you know depending on um the nature of the way you work um it's they can be a complete way so I think really making sure that you are um careful about planning meetings making sure they're short making sure they're focused making sure the people you invite are really needed um because again there's a context switch cost when you are um going into a meeting somebody might spent the last hour just building up this incredibly complex mental model about an aspect of the design or the economy you're bring them to a meeting that is gone um so I mean what we tend to do and I'll go into a little bit um detail on that in a minutes just have a meeting at the beginning of the day set up objectives and then shift to a little bit more just ad hoc communication so um we use slack for internal communication and just making sure that if something needs to be discussed people are available um to just talk through those issues together rather than forcing everyone together to go through that um we also have um you know a challenge around the international way that we work so m is based in Finland um we're also working on as I mentioned with contractors based in belus and Israel

and our publisher is based in Colorado so yeah there's kind a lot of kind of different um uh factors in there and I think the international working and working from home that really requires trust um and it requires a really healthy working relationship and it's something that I've been very lucky with M that it's it's been extremely healthy but you need to have somebody that's um self-motivated somebody that's reliable somebody that you can trust um and you know I think on their side as well you need to make sure that they're comfortable doing it CU so Miko Works um you know primarily alone um and there's you know there's a lot of challenges around that around potential Detachment around loneliness so you want to make sure that that that's something that they're aware they're um they're going in for um also yeah communication with Partners is vital um you need to make sure that you have clear communication clear shared objectives and Clear Vision for where the game's going about how you're going to help how you're going to solve problems um and again if you feel like early on early discussions early negotiations you feel like there's some issues there you feel like communication isn't very clear that should be a red alert so if this early stage of negotiations if they're not getting back obviously that program is going to be

massively Amplified when you actually have some real problems to contend with um if they're not there and they're not able to jump on and help you resolve those problems then um yeah definitely read alert early on um and also Community you know Community communication with the community is is so so valuable is something that we found with the S launch of seab beard um we really wanted to engage um and find out what people found frustrating so we were doing that from day one on forums through Touch Arcade and various other forms online um communicating with people on Twitter uh on Facebook and just finding out what they enjoy what they wanted more of um this is especially applicable for games of service it allows you to really direct um yeah what you what you create in terms of content um almost from there you know so for us Community engagement helped us raise the average review score of CB and soft launch from 3.0 um to 4.55 um and it helped us remove a lot of issues that we had around we had a very frustrating energy mechanic early on that we just ripped out entirely and a lot of that was just really just listening to players and understanding how we could adapt it to make it more suited to the way that they play you know we had ideas in our head of how we thought people would um would play the game and they weren't entirely accurate

so yeah people wanted to play for much longer sessions um and that community outreach really enabled us to to take that on um but obviously one size is not at all you know depending on the game uh depending on the project depending on your team and your makeup um I think you really need to find a communication style that works for you so questions to ask yourself uh first of all do your team understand the vision have you been really clear with them do they understand you know if it's clear that there's just something going on there and they not really getting it and repeatingly repeatedly just not really like you know pulling in that direction you know there's something you need to address um similar do they all understand the importance of their individual work how does that tie into to the overall Vision do they understand why it's important they work on this particular thing have your team had a chance to feedback um you know are you giving them opportunities to feedback or are you just generally unavailable for them to come and talk to you you know you could do it in a more formal way of just saying you know Monday mornings you have like 10 15 minutes where anyone can come and talk to you or just in a Mor way just make sure that you have a temperament that is you know um obviously U available to them um do you have clear Channels with your partners you know making sure that

communication is healthy open and clear um and similarly with the community do you make sure that they have a way of getting in contact with you are you listening to them or do you just have an arbitary Facebook page that you never update and never check and I'm hoping it's going to go to the next slide yeah um yes so internal communication at hand soers um we cook up every day with a scrum meeting 15 minute um just catch up what everyone's working on what the challenges are any blockages that they have and we can talk through that and really helps I think make sure that everyone is is clear on the communication understands what everyone is doing and I think that's increasingly valuable when you have a distributed team as it helps keep everyone on board and pulling in the same direction we use pivotal tracker we use this primarily as a way of um of well for project management it's an project management tool um and that again helps with our internationally distributed way that we work uh so Ben also works from home for two days um as a central location to see what everyone else is working on to manage um the various user stories that they're tackling um we also use slack like I think pretty much everyone now for internal communication and that has been

extremely good for us um just great again to collaborate uh on a regular basis show concept art show work in progress show videos um which you can't do if you're not um located in the same location Google Docs um we use fog bugs for Dragon QA and all of this is supplemented with trips so we make sure that M um comes over semi-regularly anytime we begin a new phase of work or anytime that we are um yeah tackling maybe a major problem or shifing or yeah something where it really um requires his presence and that kind of helps to top it up so it's not complete work remote working all the time so yeah next want to move on to risk management um so this is again is a key part of making sure that you don't have any wastage or at least you have minimal wastage uh so yeah you really want to make sure if you're creating something that's Innovative you're making something new there is going to be wasted some of those amazing ideas in your head when you put them down when you try them out they're not going to work so you want to make sure you know there's a classic Silicon Valley saying of fail early fail off and and it's it's definitely true in games if you're doing something Innovative you don't want to

get to the point where you're into the game and you're like this game is terrible we need to rip out this feature rip out this feature and all those beautiful production level assets you've created are completely wasted so yeah catching that early is very very important so risk motivation risk motivation pre-production in the early phase of the game for me it's all about prototypes it's about trying things out seeing if they work and find out if that idea on your head is a great idea after all so it doesn't need to be you know a digital prototype it doesn't need to be a playable prototype you can do it with paper um it can be you know maybe a couple of days of work maybe a game Jam to have a look around you know different ideas that you might have in the game um prototypes are awesome we've been using them extensively for all the games that we've developed um and it really again just helps crystallize ideas as well as leading to additional ideas you know one idea one predy might be a complete failure it might not work at all but um that'll lead on something else and just playing with that and having something you can kind of Tinker with and tweak just gives you the opportunity to um to lead onto new things um so when you're in production um use us testing user testing is hugely valuable encourage

people to just tear it apart get them to sit down to play it and be candid don't be sensitive you know don't just sit there and like you know tell them you got to be doing this or you should be doing this the whole point of this is to see where the frustrations are so we work with an amazing company called player research um they're based out in Brighton in the UK um and they did the whole like one day testing behind a mirror wall um where you just get to see completely unfiltered frustrations of the player playing through it at the end we got a report um and we pushed um yeah almost all those findings into the game that was hugely valuable for us to really see early on catch things early on I think it was about a year before we launched um where those frustrations are um and then pre-launch yeah s launch analytics Community engagement um this is incredibly valuable as I said again before just making sure that before you launch things are kind of ticking along nicely they're working well and that you can fix the kind of big big problems that you have um which you most likely will have if it's again if you're doing something new um so that's yeah incredibly valuable so questions to ask yourself around this um what are the

biggest areas of uncertainty is there anything in the project you're looking at and you're like you know what I really just have no idea um how that's going to work or we've got this technical solution and we think that we can have this way that it's going to work and scale in terms of connection to the database if you have any questions or any erors you just really not sure about this is what you should be prototyping doing technical spikes on um and really prioritizing that above all the other work because if you don't resolve those issues earli on obviously you're going to go down the route of your producing production assets producing things that may not make it into the final game um and then yeah taking a look at what will be at what point will the project be ready for user testing um so the guys from play research you know they're always saying just just get in as early as possible you know they will test on paper they will test very very early prototypes I think there's less value taking it to user testing when you are like two months away because there's not that much that you can change there's still some stuff but yeah you want to get in as early as possible uh and then lastly how long do you need to validate the game and beat a soft launch so again the more new the more inovative

the less you can reference other games um the longer you need that soft launch to be so have a think about that and plan accordingly to make sure that you have a soft launch that suits the title so for us a hand cers as I mentioned before it's all been about prototypes um in pre-production so the early versions of seab were absolutely bizarre and be almost no resemblance they're actually a little bit further on um than the game is now the first prototype was a game where you paint paths to lead goats around an environment then the goats stack on top of each other and then we're working on this other prototype that was about stealing from your friends and pickpocketing them and the two just kind of naturally evolved and just became this other um other game and this other prototype itself so yeah for us it's it's not just a way of of mitigating risk it's also a source of inspiration so that's been yeah a huge win for us as I mentioned before user testing with player research um very very valuable just sitting down watching People's frustrations just provides so much information so much guidance as you know if a hand of seven people see it by the time you're talking about millions of

users that problem is massively Amplified so catch it early and and fix it early and then we use localytics um for our analytics package and that's been great for us just to really dig in and and understand where pinch points are in terms of the final where people are dropping out of the game and again what people are spending money on um you know there's a certain amount of information you can get from engaging with the community but you know that needs to be complemented with you know hard analytics so you know one of the things that we found um after global launch is how little people were spending on um cosmetic items so we assumed we have a little bit of like an animal crossing Vibe um to some extent in our game and we thought that customization was going to be huge so that led to us um looking into the analytics and just seeing this is just not really selling and then modifying the game to um basically give all the Cosmetic items a functional upgrade as well through a b through a badge system and that's been a huge win for us so paying close attention to analytics and making sure that you have that well instrumented to be able to ask the questions that you need so now I want to talk a little bit about technical considerations so things that you can do when you're planning out the tech um and tools for your project to make sure again that there's little

wastage and you're really kind of turbocharging the um resources that you have um so one of the first things here is Art pipeline um with uh the um with okab boom with PS3 game that we did the art pipeline was gruesome it was absolutely horrible you had to export there all these like text files you had to copy and paste and then if we wanted to actually try it on the PS3 we had to do a complete new build um so the iteration time was really really long um and I think you know great work usually results from being able to experiment and tinker and have fast iteration um you know if if if you're using existing engines like you know like Unity this problem is pretty much solved you know it's incredible the fact that you can just go in and update 3D assets update textures update sounds and they just gets updated in real time so you know depending whether or not you're building like everything from scratch this is a real key consideration to making sure there's no wastage on the artist side and making sure they can see it in engine themselves rather than having to hand it over and then see it on another screen again just tightens up the duration loop as much as possible um another thing is build pipeline so um yeah builds can take a while um builds can be inconsistent if

you're going through and like checking various check boxes to make sure that it matches you make mistakes so we automated the Bild Pipeline on our side so we used um Team City uh we had a spare machine and we had team City to build a Bill's minion and this was yeah great for us it saved a whole bunch of time on Ben side you know every time was taking like an hour or two to like get everything built up and push everything to test flight create bespoke X code projects um so that was a huge win the nice thing as well obviously it will test and check your code for you and then email anyone that's put anything bad into it um we also had it so it tested and checked data and assets and I'll go into that a little bit in a minute it wasn't just the code itself we made sure that if somebody had accidentally deleted that was something that was vital for Mission progression it would get alerted so it really helped um reduce the number of errors and the amount of um fixes that we'd have to do when we got through the QA side so yeah it really felt like we'd hired an extra employee and we got this all running the nice thing is you know Unity is starting to add this into their um Service as well so it's Unity Cloud bills that they've um recently announced for instantly pushed and this means you

don't even need to configure a machine it's all in the cloud and they'll handle the various bills of various platforms yourself for you so that's again a huge win in sense of productivity so tying into that middleware um this really depends you know on the nature of the project um do you need to to build this yourself or is it much easier just going and buying something off the shelf so are you creating a tile that requires bespoke Tech it might be that um the tech you use in your game is something that's a real kind of centerpiece something that's very unusual something that's very kind of C to the experience it's something you can't get off the shelf you know so for example like you know the kind of the the amazing procedural environments in no man Sky um or you know the kind of the the Voxer landscape in Minecraft a lot of that is is not really something you get off the shelf if you got a tech C team and you really feel like you want to make your game distinguished by Tech or by particular features it might be your better off building the whole thing um yourself um on the other side though if you're a very um uh design or artled team makes more sense for you to to get something off the shelf if that's not really a specialization um and obviously you need

to measure off the cost of license versus cost of internal development um How much would it cost you to do this you know we use Unity um and for us uh it means that we have you know this incredible expertise of people that would produce better code than we possibly could in terms of rendering terms of Animation so for us yeah it's a no-brain arm um and the last thing is again if you're licensing you get ongoing maintenance costs so you're not having to fix up the engine for every new release of iOS you're not having to fix up um anytime new things are introduced that break things um you're effectively getting on going maintenance contract with that as well that has huge value so as I was saying we're using un pretty much everything we used it for the creation of the game itself the game itself runs Unity but also we had a lot of time that we invested in terms of extending the game the engine itself with a lot of bespoke tools that we use to create level design um we use it for Content management so we have bespoke tools that handle things like accessories items things like that um and obviously for testing and debugging so on the test side yes so we use tests quite extensively in the game um we use it for um testing the

consistency of the data itself so say for example I don't know how many of you played CID but if you play through the game we have smuggle Quest so every island needs to have a smuggle receiver it will generate a random Quest that will pick one of the various smuggle receivers in the game we need to make sure that um we have shakeable trees that we can hide lost items in all these little things are kind of intrinsic and if somebody goes through and like starts deleting these by accident and pushes it they'll be notified by the build service saying something has broken um which has been great for us it also makes sure it goes through and checks for any um inconsistencies in missing dialog Keys um in various languages um and this just I think cut down a lot of the issues that we would have found later on because we knew that we were pretty sure about all this data it didn't need to be tested by hand um so yeah question to ask yourself when you're planning out tests for the game what future issues can be spotted by creating tests now so yeah when you're going through the game you might think you know what this is like this is a huge risk here um for example like if we accidentally delete these these objects there or if there's a lot of stuff like to manually check through this is going to take huge amount of

time have a think about what future issues can be spotted by creating these tests put that in the plan also really consider the cost of automated versus manual test if there's one particular aspect that's going to be incredibly complicated for write autom tests for but it's something you only need to it might take half an hour to test manually each time obviously there you know that's a false economy and it's not something you'd really want to go ahead with so really consider what the implications are of developing the automated test and whether or not it's really worth doing and you know tied into that what information is required in the report to fix you know it's great that you found this era but you want to be as Vose as possible and deliver back to the person that calls this issue what the fix is so it's no use saying like a particular grid coordinate or an idea of an object has disappeared um you want to make sure the information is there for the the person to go through and fix that themselves so now yeah I want to talk a little bit about service so cir was our first online game um and for us you know having not had a lot of online experience it was a real question as to whether or not we wanted to um host the servers ourselves how we wanted to do that and whether or not we wanted to

bring that knowledge in house um there's obviously a lot of options out there which will take care of either a lot or a little of the um the overhead for you um and obviously the more that you kind of f out get other people to look after um the more expensive it is but you know you have to balance out with the cost of hiring a specialist knowledge yourself so the questions you want to ask yourself when you're planning out your service solution if you're doing a server based game are there any advantages in managing the service yourself it might be that you actually need to host the service yourself for various you know data compliance rules uh or privacy um but in most cases it's probably unlikely um do you want or need a full-time CIS admin again one of our objectives was to keep the team really lean um it wasn't really a huge need for that and they weren't going to be needed full time there wasn't that much work there so that was pretty much an no-brainer um also it might be you don't even need to write the server code yourself there's a lot of commodi services that are starting to come out there that offer a more kind of General Solution that's totally fine for a lot of the the games that you make so play faab is one you know relatively recently announced um where yeah they'll offer

something which will provide a lot of things around currency around internet purchase around inventory um that yeah means that you don't need to create that yourself and again saves you resources so for us we used Google app engine for CID this was fantastic it meant that we didn't need to do any Administration ourselves we effectively outsourced all the sis admin work to Google um the server development you probably saw in the earli slide that was outsourced as well so we work with a specialist company called Lost Property and they handled all of the server development um for us they're also great in terms of responding to issues that we had so around launch um we had obviously a massive massive spike in traffic um and when we were heading above a certain pressure I request the whole thing like when crazy and they were great to work with they really helped um resolve that issue and get that fixed as soon as possible but again um it really depends on your scenario you may that may be just completely um yeah impossible you may need to have somebody that is just available um um yeah every hour of the day so tools again you know tools is

something you really need to consider to really kind of turbocharge uh the team that you have to make sure that they have um the right elements to be able to you massively improve their efficiency so can you invest to save time is it where spending a little bit of time early on to really um yeah create tools for them to use that will automate repetitive tasks or really just amplify their creative input so you know the questions you need to ask yourself when you're planning whether or not to create tools so what are the biggest areas of repetitive manual work is there's something you're just doing again and again and again that just can be repeated that can be automated um and also is the data input becoming unwieldy or prone to errors so when we were planning out the assets um and the clothing and accessories for card it's like 1 and a half thousand um Island assets at the moment that you can place down um and the com the system for generating accessories was so completely unwieldy so you have like we had this huge huge Json file that had like you know whether or not it's comp with old people or people with like this particular size of face or whether or

not it's compatible with these particular cultures and that you know is completely impossible to visualize so it was it made it very very error prone so that was a perfect candidate for creating misspoke tool um and yeah can these process be made more efficient so one of the things that we had in the game um with the level editor um we wanted to make it so you could just paint and not really worry about the particular rotation the tile when you're painting a path so if you can imagine you're painting like tile by tile by tile you paint a corner we didn't want you to have to go down and choose the corner piece and paint that we wanted it so you could just paint and it would just look great uh saves a lot of time take a little bit of time to implement but yeah in the end it saved just way more time because it was fully automated another consideration there is who will be using these tools so if you are creating these tools you want to make sure that they're created not for the mind the mental model of the person building the tool but for the mental model of the uh person that's going to be using it and tied into that there may be something already out there so again one of the benefits of of you know engines like Unity a lot of people are creating these tools you know certain things like meding grids and um en lighting uh there's already tools out

there that may do this for you so it's definitely worth checking to make sure that you can't drop you know $50 uh to create something that's going to take you a couple of weeks to build um so in terms of our own internal tools uh we had a bespoke level editor so this is something that we built on top of unity um that allowed us to create um just the environment so internally the game is basically a 2d game the representation is 3D um but there is a ton of complexity to the dialogue um itself so the dialogue is branching we have procedural elements templating U and all this needs to be tied to progress events in the game um so we wrote with spoke edit to take care of that complexity again there's no way that we could have done this um using just flat text files uh we also use a cmap editor so we create something to create the ocean to create the C hexes to create the C paaths and edit the C paaths from A to B and we had a Content management system that we used to edit things like items like Island assets that again grew out from these unwieldy Json files that we had early on so here you can see the level editor that we

created and on the right you can see that's how we structured the dialogue um so yeah you can assign requirements so for example you might have a mission where um you needed to give them a particular item that was from this particular area or you might have you need to defeat certain creatures and this basically allowed us to intelligently query various other Data Systems and populate the options there rather than just choosing from huge drop down Lisk or just putting in numbers um and this is our C editor so this is how we created the islands and the paths between them so the sailing mini games used these paths and again that allowed us to be a little bit more creative rather than just tapping in random numbers uh and this is the content management system that we created for editing item so this is online in this case rather than unity and this is one of the only online tools that we had and then Unity had a when we build the project it would just pull down all the various data from the databases online so another component obviously a hugely important um part of the process working with QA we were very fortunate um working with backli Q department they were awesome um really helped us get through a very complex project um and

produce something that was enormously stable um but one of the considerations from this there was some asymmetry obviously on our side it was just myself and Ben that were able to fix issues um and they had you know a considerable size team that were really throwing a lot of bugs at us so we need to be quite smart about how we could do this and how we could work intelligently with them to make sure that we overloaded with the work that needed to be done so one of the things that we did and I highly highly recommend using this if you I know I'm talking about Unity a lot um but I know it's pretty prevalent U we use something there that's available in the asset store called touch console Pro and this allowed us to provide a ton of tools internally um for them to use so for example incrementing currency setting certain objectives been complete there's a task that needed to be done 25 times it meant they didn't have to go through 25 times you can just bind specific commands to there um and it runs really nicely on device it also meant that if the game crashed could email the log along with their save data file over to us and it meant that that process was super smooth and super transparent so yeah that was highly recommend ended another thing that was an interesting kind of problem well not problem but due to the circumstance we

were working um they were in different time zone to us so generally actually worked out quite well uh that by the end of the day when we were working we would uh we would send over new bills um just as they were waking up that address all the issues in the previous day um and similarly when we came in the morning then we would have a whole load of new bugs to work on so he actually end up working out quite well um so lastly I want to talk a little bit about empowerment about how you can kind of create an environment um for your team to really Thrive um and tied into that really uh talking about culture so you know once you found those awesome team members building culture is really about creating environment to thrive I it like building a zoo enclosure for a given creature and so it really will be a lot like um yeah just really considering you know what they need and how they need to be supported so you know an enclosure for a ll is going to be very different to a miria cat it's going to different to a red panda so it will depend on your team and what your objectives and how you want to to run the business so I want to give three examples of different companies that have created quite an empowering culture quite different culture and I think really interesting as a as a touch point it's certainly for for worth taking a look at uh the first

one is Netflix so there's a great presentation um given by Reed Hastings CEO of Netflix U called high performance culture and again that's the URL there where you can take a look at it um but he talks about creating a culture of creativity and self-discipline freedom and responsibility uh to attract the type of person that picks up trash lying on the floor rather than just leaving it there um and so he talks about the fact that you know great workplac is stunning colleagues you know it's not about you know benefits and free lunches and micro scooters and whatnot it's really people want to go and be great at what they do and create an environment that encourages that is important um so yeah it's essentially about hiring high performance self-disciplined people and keeping process and rules light um so he talks about yeah rather than really over-engineering process and having something that specifies every element of the rules um generally it's about hiring people that are able to kind of interpret a relatively right set of rules appropriately and intelligently so for example they have no policy for vacation or tracking a vacation the idea is that if you want to take

vacation just make sure that you do it responsibly and you know achieve the things that you need to do within that don't let that disrupt that or they have a gift policy which is just act in Netflix best interests they don't need specify any more than that um and you know the right person will just interpret that appropriately and I think it's really interesting and I think so he was saying this one of the things to allow them grow quite efficiently is obviously when businesses tend to grow the uh process has to scale with that and sometimes that can become quite unwieldy and by keeping process relatively light and and hiring people that fit into that and quite self- responsible um it works out very well for them uh another one is unisy um so this is an interesting presentation by Aris who is uh unties on a head Graphics guy um and he talks about uh lightweight chaos so um so in in his example he used a similar discussion of saying that processes are for managing well like complex process are for managing mediocre people and if you want to hire really great people um you don't want to force a huge amount of process upon them so they got a high distributed Team 17 offices 21 person places and he's saying

a lot of them are very allergic to process they don't like to feel too constrained by them um but they're very responsible and so putting an emphasis on trust and responsibility just allows them to work really well the way that they want to but still deliver great results without taking a blood of resources on creating you know a really complicated process uh and lastly Pixar so this is a fantastic book by Cal president of Pixar um and he spent the last 10 years um with this is his primary focus just trying to understand how you can build a workplace that allows people to to Really Thrive and feel good about the way that they work allows um kandor and constant reevaluation of of the work that's being done and the way that you work and an emphasis on on equality and balance of teams and departments as well um so you really don't he says in there of you know sometimes you might have a a company where there's like the Rockstar Department say for example if you're um you know if you've got a game studio and the people the rock stars like say the game designers or the artists and you might have people in QA that are treated like second class citizens and making sure that you know that's you really want to make sure that if you

launch a game and and the game is you know full of bugs then you know that's that's you know completely ridiculous you want to make sure that respect is there across all boundaries and everyone is treated equally and that way you're all pulling together the same goal I think that's uh yeah really interesting very applicable to to work in the games as well because I think ultimately you know productive people are happy people you want to make sure that you know they are given the chance to work their best you know everyone goes to work and they don't want to just get through the day they want to do great work uh and creating an environment to be their best and be supported to be their best um and finding that sweet spot so really just find the balance of reaching and and pushing the personal limits without going over to the point where they are just um you know snapping and I think you know that takes clear communication and make sure you understand the individual employees to do that so yeah the question to ask yourself um you know what environment would enable your team to thrive knowing your team members knowing the nature of the project knowing the nature of your team what can you do to improve that what can you do to to to create that environment for them um does your process support or suffocate you know do you have something that's over engineered or do you have something potentially that's just yeah there's not enough there that people are lost people

don't understand why they're you know they're failing or why they're doing things wrong maybe it hasn't been clear maybe it hasn't been you know communicated well so getting that sweet spot again is vital um is there an imbalance between teams and disciplines do some people regard themselves as the core of the company and the others are peripheral and try and you know balance that out so that everyone has an equal um representation and uh and position the company um you know so for us again we're a relatively small team um but we we tend to be you know quite intense in terms of the the work hours uh we don't work long hours um so we generally work 9:30 till 6:00 um but the time that's there you know from an exteral perspective it it probably doesn't look as fun as you know working so I start off working in digital design and there are no micro scooters and foodball tables and everything else like that it's it's maybe a little bit dry but I think it works right for the team and and s in the way that we work and it means that we don't work long hours uh the hours are flexible um location's flexible I was saying you know M um works from another location uh Ben has a small child um so he works from home two days a week and that's what great for us you know it means that he has the flexibility to the work that he wants to and um it means that we can hire people

that um that do need and and work better within those um level of flexibility uh and we really don't have um you know overtime or crunch uh occasionally we may work a little bit later in the evening occasionally work at weekends but that's extremely extremely rare and I think that's a key part of it to make sure that you know that to see overtime and crunch as a failure uh certainly on my part if I haven't planned the project out properly or we haven't you know put those plans in place then we want to make sure that we minimize that uh anonymes and Trust responsibility and shared problem solving again so you know problems aren't just one individuals everything that we can do to to make sure that we share those problems a key part of the way that we work so yeah in conclusion you can get a lot done with a small amount of resources I know there's been a lot of different topics covered here but yeah if you can build the right team make sure they're aligned and have clear goals give them what they need to do their best uh get rid of any efficiencies hopefully they can make amazing things um so I've covered a lot of different subjects here but yeah I'm happy to take any question questions that you might have I think we've got about four minutes yeah four minutes left so um

yeah [Music] thanks hi uh I had a couple questions um being a small team did you have I know you said you've self-published but you've also worked with a partner y um in both instances how did you kind of build a community like try and get people excited about the game that you're working on so um I think in both cases we announced quite early um so and we didn't do a great job um with okoo again because we a little bit stretched resources but certainly for the other games we released Orlando one and two um and OKO we announced way before the game came out so I think you can start just really cultivating interest and making sure that people are aware of it going to events like this so yeah GDC was instrumental for for you know announcing both those games and just basically keep you know trickling that information over so it's always in the awareness of players great um the

other question I had was uh you talked about prototyping and like maybe like a small game Jam or whatever how much time did you spend on that before you determined um like okay this is something that we're going to move forward with um and you said you had successes and failures how much time did you actually spend on that process yeah so I think for Rando is probably around 3 4 months of predater until we actually had like the feature set just absolutely down at that stage it was just me so that was before um I started working with Mo and obviously at that stage it means you know you can take a lot longer to get things right and I think that is a cool part about that if you're trying something new to make sure you have that kind of runoff time to make sure that you're not just forced into making something that you know isn't quite right um with cab beard pre-production was around 6 months so we had something together in around 3 months that represented um what we felt the game should be but around 3 months after that till we had um everything locked down that actually represented the final product and to be honest we were

actually still changing things up to around six months because we had user testing we had internal feedback so it wasn't yeah it it kept tweaking we kept tweaking it right until um kind of the final stages of production great thanks also I'd like to say it's great that other people are using slack it's been a great tool great yeah it's been awesome for us as well thanks thanks hey I had a quick question in regards to uh you talking about wearing many different hats uh you know doing game Direction uh lead program and bisv um as all those departments would throughout the course of a project kind of have to give and take and you know there would be scope creep or you know stuff that you guys are going to have to sacrifice in order to ship the game yeah just curious how you handled those types of situations what were the advantages and disadvantages to doing that all kind of yourself and if you involved anybody else with it yeah I think it's I think it's important to try and um wherever possible isolate the ones you know will have that natural tension and do whatever you can to extract that and I mean I generally find the best thing is just writing the arguments for and against down if it is a role that has that natural tension so in some cases for example um you know it's really not

a problem if you're doing community management and game Direction because those don't really have a natural opposition but if it's one where the objectives are quite often kind of against each other that I think the best thing is just yeah just writing it down writing it down leaving it for a couple of days letting it sink in and then to make a decision I think giving yourself breathing time to actually work through that is a real key part of making that don't make snap decisions because otherwise they probably haven't been considered as well as you need them to be cool thanks for the talk great thanks just real quick um do you use your prototype code in assets for the final game or do you throw that away and start over mostly um yeah so generally we won't write something that's too throw away because the nice thing is if you try and write something that's quite reusable early on it means you can carry on evolving it in the Prototype rather than having to make everything from scratch um so yeah generally we didn't rewrite the code base there's a few exceptions of things we actually just had to throw away so we had a Terrain system that by the end was just total garbage and we're like this just needs to rewrite but it was done much more on

an adhoc basis rather than the principle of like always one or always the other thank you thanks cool [Applause] cheers