You're in a game project crunch. How can you unite art and design teams to meet the deadline?
Dive into the game development fray: how do you bridge the creative divide under deadline pressure? Share your strategies for fostering team unity.
You're in a game project crunch. How can you unite art and design teams to meet the deadline?
Dive into the game development fray: how do you bridge the creative divide under deadline pressure? Share your strategies for fostering team unity.
-
Uniting teams can be difficult especially if you have different priorities and focus areas. The best thing to do is to get everyone on Zoom at once and yell, "For Gondor!". Nearly 60% of the time, this works every time.
-
While any job might have times of extra push around a hard deadline, long sustained crunch is usually the fault of bad planning. Given that, it's important to plan out the remaining needs and share the plan broadly. Traige the remaining work from all departments with a critical, unbiased eye, filter it down to the "must have" vs "nice to have" vs "don't bother with this" lists, and then communicate that out. Then, set the tone that "Perfect is the enemy of good", and ensure the leads are reviewing builds daily to determine what level of polish is required for remaining work. Some areas that a player may barely ever see don't require as much effort as hero pieces. Keep sharing out the daily accomplishments and the "what's remaining" list.
-
Maintaining momentum during a moment of crunch requires alignment across all functions as to what the most impactful tasks are for the players. This can be done by reviewing and prioritizing the backlog of bugs and tasks with the teams, along with a review of the impact of each fix and the possible risks of those fixes to other systems. As the teams review the backlog each function gets to voice their opinion regarding possible impact. Example: The art team wants to fix some model collision issues in the opening cinematic while the design team wants a new locomotion animation that would utilize the same animator's time. Review the time to complete each issue, the expected impact to the player, and what other systems the fix might break.
Rate this article
More relevant reading
-
Game DevelopmentWhat do you do if your ideas are constantly being overlooked in a team of game developers?
-
Game DevelopmentHow can you handle disagreements between departments during game development?
-
Gaming IndustryHere's how you can efficiently prioritize tasks in the gaming industry.
-
Game DevelopmentWhat are the most common mistakes when critiquing a game?