Time-Boxing 'CREATIVITY'!

How To Meet Deadlines While Being ‘Creative’!

Game Development could be easily ranked one of the most creative career options within the Information Technology field. It amalgamates the creative side with the technical/ programmatic side. At the same time, like any other creative field, it could turn out to be a nightmarish job for the leadership team trying to push the game out of the door to start seeing revenues out of it.

I am sure the dilemma faced is not just unique to game development process. Any creative field would possibly have similar challenges.

For instance, how would a Music Composer conclude his/her song? Would (s)he probably consider going back to the song and add that one more instrument or modify that one tune that could add more zing to the song? If that ‘change process’ continues unquestioned, would that song or album ever be out in the market?

Another similar example that comes to mind. Let’s assume a particular emotional scene in a movie requires a serene sunset in the backdrop. That sunset, acting, dialogues etc., all have to come together to make the scene ‘the best scene’ of the movie. What if the Director doesn’t feel it is coming along well? How many such ‘sunsets’ can the producer afford considering each day delay in the schedule could not only increase the production cost but also have a ripple effect on the actors’ schedules?

Similar to the examples above, new game development too involves everything coming together. The concept, game play, the art, the characters, animations, backdrop and even the color palettes used for the simplest of the buttons.

Left to themselves, the creative team can really spend ages to come up with that ‘perfect’ art, ‘perfect’ design and ‘perfect’ game play. But some one needs to bell the cat! Once agreed to a production schedule, the multiple (creative) iterations need to be managed within those schedule parameters in order to hit the market in the committed time period.

Digging a bit deeper into the psyche of the creative people, it is but natural to except them to be slightly out of the ordinary. They get hyper-productive at odd hours, usually late evenings. Though it would be criminal to generalize, more often than not, they sleep late, wake up late and come to office late.

When you ask about the status of the work, the usual answer that you can expect from them, is that it is “ALMOST DONE”. You might find them secretly working on that last bit of polishing to go inside the latest build! Believe me, there will not be any end to that ‘polishing’ unless someone sitting outside the boxing ring, silently observing the missing schedules, calls it out loud and clear.

Here’s a hypothetical conversation that you might encounter while talking to the person in charge of the creative team (purely hypothetical and over-dramatized)!.

Manager (M): Hey, I see the team left the office at 4 am this morning. Is everything alright?

Team Lead (TL): Yep. There was a small glitch in the ‘Cute Dog’ animation. It was not coming along well. So, the team decided to work on it and we ended up staying late.

M: Oh, whats the issue? The Dog animation was all signed off last evening at 5. Isn’t it?

TL: Yep, we completed it at 5. But when we put it on the device, it was looking awful. Everyone hated it. We decided to just fix it up and re-do the animation.

M: Fair enough, but that would have just taken an hour or two. How come, the entire night?

TL: Oh yeah, we fixed the Cute Dog animation by 8 yesterday, but when we put it on the device, the tile layout and background images weren’t matching up to the Cute Dog animation. We decided to work on the background and polished the object placements as well. Now it has come out superb.

M: Oh fantastic. Can I have it loaded on the device for me to have a look please?

TL: Yep, sure. We are encountering an issue with the hi-poly image size now. We should be done with it in the next 15 mins. How about I come back to you once we fix it up too?

M: Are you sure it is going to take just 15 mins to fix up an hi-poly image loading issue on the device?

TL: Yep. Fairly confident. Will come back to latest in half an hour.

M: (In the evening): Were you able to get the latest BG and Dog animation loaded on the device?

TL: We did, but the popups are now looking too raw. We thought of polishing them too before releasing a build!

… the story continues!

So, how do you, as a person responsible for the delivery of the game, get over this situation? Rather, how do you get the people working on the project to get over this “ALMOST DONE” syndrome?

So, here are a few tips to save the day before it is too late.

Absolute ownership and clearly defined roles and responsibilities — Too many cooks spoil the broth. So, there needs to be clearly defined roles of who is requesting, who is reviewing and who is approving the changes. It would be ideal to have one (max two) who decide what is “good” and “not good”. Every one will have an opinion about the outcome but the team cannot sway to the feedback and comments of everyone to achieve the whimsical “best”!

Reuse, Reuse and Reuse — Irrespective of how much the team likes to do everything from scratch, it is best to reuse the assets, designs, UI placements of buttons, character animations, win/loss animations etc. from the existing asset store than creating new all the time. Many man-days (if not man-months) of efforts can be saved by re-purposing what is already existing (include code and libraries).

Constant feedback and fail early — It should be ingrained in the teams to adopt a mechanism of getting constant feedback from the stakeholders and adopting changes early. Every aspect of the game including monetization, ad placements, difficulty levels etc., should be going through a constant feedback loop rather than keeping it to the end. The stakeholders who eventually would “GreenLight” the project to be released to the store, needs to be involved in each and every step of the game development. Agile Development is the best resource to help keep the game teams on track.

Micromanagement for shorter duration-As much as managers hate to micromanage and team members hate to be micromanaged; if you see the creative juices flowing uncontrollably, it is best to micromanage for short duration, till the team eventually sets sail. There will be a feedback from team that given more time, the game would have come out better; but believe me, even if you had given twice the time asked by the team- the output would probably be the same. By micromanaging, you might be able to give the necessary support or that additional resource that may help the team which is struggling.

Decide quality vs timelines and how much to compromise on each- Let me also emphasize that it is not always criminal to miss the deadlines. If the game is genuinely more effort consuming than it was originally thought to be, it is still okay to extend deadlines than to produce a less-worthy game. It is up to you to decide whether quality is sacrosanct or timelines! Also, to be fair to the team, it is not that they don’t understand the deadlines. But when chasing the stars while meeting deadlines, they end up spending extended hours at work, inadvertently resulting in burn out and loss in productivity.

Hope you enjoyed reading this write up. Would look forward to hear your thoughts on what you feel about the topic.