The Working Lunch
Game production and creative leadership for producers.
Documents
How Producers Can Make Games More Accessible
Game producers play a critical role in fostering inclusive development environments by prioritizing accessibility throughout the production lifecycle.
- Accessibility features should be defined broadly as any option that allows a player to customize their experience, including standard settings like volume management that benefit users with sensory issues.
- Approximately 15% of the world's population experiences some form of disability, representing a significant potential audience that is often overlooked in development.
- Producers should integrate accessibility into the design process early to avoid the high costs and technical constraints associated with retrofitting features late in production.
Risk Roadmapping for Game Development
Risk roadmapping serves as a strategic framework for game development teams to identify, visualize, and mitigate project threats.
- A risk roadmap is a high-level project visualization that maps epics against a timeline while integrating key risk factors—such as resourcing, dependencies, or milestone constraints—to facilitate mitigation planning.
- The process requires a backlog assessment where teams use estimation methods like T-shirt sizing to identify and flag epics with high levels of uncertainty or risk.
- Visualizing risk clusters on a roadmap allows leadership to identify patterns, such as backend instability or milestone-specific bottlenecks, which can then be addressed using 'How Might We' problem-solving statements.
Iterations on Game Dev Meetings to Nurture Neurodiversity
The primary objective of this analysis is to provide game producers with actionable strategies to optimize meeting structures for neurodiverse teams.
- To foster neurodiversity, game development meetings should prioritize asynchronous communication for decision-making and information dissemination, keeping messages concise and focused on one topic.
- Meeting effectiveness can be improved by making stand-up updates visible in a persistent format (e.g., Jira boards) to accommodate team members who struggle with verbal retention.
- Establish clear, written expectations for meeting behaviors, such as allowing pacing, camera-off participation in digital meetings, or using fidget cubes, to increase focus and meaningful contribution.
Building Our Resource Management Map
The primary objective of this initiative is to address the complexities of resource management within the game development industry by fostering a collaborative community of production leaders.
- A recent gathering of Sydney-based game producers identified resource management as a key challenge, encompassing issues like capacity planning, team budgeting, context switching, and multi-project prioritization.
- Small, multi-project teams frequently assign individuals to multiple projects and regularly adjust team compositions to meet changing demands and new business opportunities.
- AAA studios prioritize maintaining team cohesion on specific work streams and managing long-term project assignments based on relationships between team members, stakeholders, and production.
The Working Lunch Newsletter
The Working Lunch serves as a specialized platform dedicated to the professional development of individuals working in game production and creative leadership.
- The Working Lunch is launching a free newsletter focused on game production and creative leadership.
- The newsletter's first issue and information about meetups are forthcoming.
- The newsletter is published on Substack and was announced on June 14, 2021.