Hideout!

Whether you’re thinking about creating a game on your own or in a partnership or group setting, there will be several components of your final product that are interdependent. So to make sure that all of the little parts add up to one awesome final product it’s best to communicate between the different sections (ie: 3D, programming, concept art, game theme and story, etc) early on itself.

With different people being responsible for various parts of the project, it’s easy to slip into your own silo and forget how your work interacts with your team member’s in the final product. The difference between a video game development project as opposed to most other technical ones is in how it’s compartmentalized, but not. For example, our team is very diverse and each of us have our own specialties that we feel most comfortable doing. But that doesn’t mean we each do our own thing, smoosh them all together and end up with amazing-ness, ex: the 3D modeler just models whatever they feel like and on their deliverable date just submit the required models. No, that person needs to make sure their model complies with programming needs (ie: ‘poly-counts’ are compatible with the game engine, etc) plus models should follow all stylistic requirements including the story, theme and concept art, and more. So the interdependencies run deep when creating a video game, and the best way to make sure the project runs smoothly throughout is to communicate all of the time.

Whether you just drew a new stick man to demonstrate a character animation, or you created a particle engine run for the stars in your space scenes make sure to show your work to some of your colleagues throughout your development stages. This way you won’t have to go back to the drawing board every time if your work doesn’t gel with that of your co-workers. If your project involves a lot of people, show your work periodically to the people responsible for portions of the project that are directly related to your work, for example if you work at EA games, don’t go showing your stick figure to the entire company. Instead run it by the animator, the 3D modeler and the programmer to find out if the animation is feasible from the perspective of each respective department.

The most important part about communication in a project such as this is to be ‘aware’. Be aware that your work is a spoke in the wheel and that it needs to work together with all of the other parts to make the wheel turn. If you don’t know who or what departments would be dependent on your results, ask. Keeping yourself isolated and uncommunicative not only makes you a poor sport in a team setting, but it may slow your project timeline down if in the end your work doesn’t comply with everyone else’s and you’re sent back to the drawing board.

This entry was posted on Monday, October 26th, 2009 at 5:00 am and is filed under Team. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.