原文作者：Sara Casen 译者：Megan Shieh

在联合创立Midnight Hub之前，我曾在Paradox和Tarsier等公司工作过。Midnight Hub是一个由五位开发者组成的瑞典游戏工作室。我们即将推出的《Lake Ridden》是一款第一人称益智游戏，游戏中充满了故事和谜团。

时间、资金、体力、士气和脑力

当我们在做某件事情的时候，无论具体是什么事，大家都必须管理好手中的资源。最基本的资源是：时间，资金以及你产品的规模。

时间这个概念对于人类的大脑来说，其实是有点不好理解的。有些日子似乎在眨眼间就过去了，而另一些日子却感觉度日如年。

不同的任务会消耗团队中的不同种资源。比如：为游戏中的房子建造30个新道具可能不会花费任何额外的资金，但它需要很多时间来制作，如果是单调的工作，团队成员的士气可能就会受到打击。

开发游戏的时候，大部分团队手中的资金都是有限的。游戏发行后，你会希望自己能够把之前花出去的这些钱赚回来；不仅如此，要想继续开发其他的游戏，你还得赚更多的钱。有些东西是非常烧钱的，比如人力（员工薪水）或者雇用一个QA公司来帮你做Bug测试。

另外一种消耗量很大的资源是体力。无论你是在拔萝卜还是在写代码，都会用到体力。其次就是脑力。如果你在工地上搬了一天的砖，那么它可能会对你的肌肉产生严重的影响，但对你的大脑可能没有那么大的影响。然而如果你整天都在解决电子表格里的复杂、抽象的问题，那么等到下班的时候你可能就会感受到它对你大脑的影响。

我在上一篇博文中谈到了“物资”，你在工作的时候消耗或磨损了哪些物资？制作游戏所需的设备一般都不多；而其他工作，比如从树上提炼纸张就需要大量的设备和原材料。

最后（也许也是最重要的资源），你需要照料好团队的士气/动力。如果没有动力，就算是一件非常简单的事情也会变得极其困难。动力的缺失很有可能会毁掉整个团队。它是一件非常难得的东西，大多数有创造力的人到了一定的阶段就不会被金钱所鼓舞了。所以如果你做游戏纯粹是为了赚大钱的话，那么我认为这个行业可能不适合你。

艰巨任务

综上所述，游戏制作过程中消耗的资源分别是：时间、金钱、物资、脑力、体力和士气。资金预算可以转化成为时间预算——你口袋里剩下的钱可以再发几个月的薪水、交几个月的房租？然后你可以把估算好的剩余时间分配给游戏中的不同部分。

有些任务比其他的任务更难完成，这就是我们所谓的“艰巨任务（Mammoth Task）”。这类任务需要投入大量的时间和金钱来完成，它们会让你感到体力不支并且充分消耗你的脑力。至于它们对士气的影响就比较难说。如果你将自己的游戏展示给媒体，然后媒体都很喜欢这款游戏，那么团队的士气就会得到鼓舞，而不是消耗。

我们用“Mammoth Task”来专门形容同时消耗上述所有资源的任务。这些任务既庞大又复杂，你之前可能从来都没有完成过类似的任务。这类任务需要用到巨多的脑力和时间，而且如果你弄错的话，后果可能会非常严重。比如说，为一款游戏构建一个全新的照明系统，或者寻找投资者来投资你的项目。如有某人手上有这么一个任务的话，那么你可以考虑先让他们完成80%或50%就够了，因为这类任务很容易把人搞得精疲力竭。记住，你最不想要的就是把你的开发人员逼疯。

在团队内部进行进度评估

我们的项目管理理念是始终以目标为中心。只要是能够测量和跟踪的东西，我们都会这么做！大部分人其实都很喜欢有一个明确的工作目标，他们只是不喜欢做计划（特别是创意人员！）。目标的范围很广，比如“处理掉这些Bug”或者“在周五之前把这篇博文写出来”。人们（特别是创意人员！）讨厌的是没有必要的会议。通过采用之前在另一篇博文中提到的“ABC-方法”，再加上下面的“冲刺秘诀”，我们已经为自己的开发项目定义了明确的目标，列举出了达到这些目标所需要完成的事情，以及在这个过程中将会消耗的资源。上述方法可以帮助我们把每周的会议次数保持在最低限度。

六个多月来，我们一直在追踪《Lake Ridden》的进展情况。每周五当我们结束一周的冲刺时，我们会坐下来，每个人都可以对他们本周的“进展”进行评分，一共有10个范畴，每个范畴分配一个介于1到10之间的数字。虽然这不是什么天才想法，但它确实表明了团队成员每周所取得(或缺乏)的进展。看到自己的取得的进展，然后和团队成员分享你的成就，这种做法可以在很大程度上鼓舞团队的士气并且将开发过程保持在一个良好的速度。

此外，我们还将“压力”加入了考虑范围。如果压力山大的话，进展快速又有什么用呢？每周五，我们的团队成员都会在0-5之间选择一个数字来表示他们一周的压力值。“5”意味着你有严重的压力症状，比如头痛、失眠、情绪波动、脉搏升高等。

如果它耗尽了团队的精力，那么这些进展就不值得了，因此每个人都被要求在每次冲刺结束的时候给自己的压力打分。

（游戏邦注：软件开发中会有两个非常不同的速度类型：短期速度 【冲刺】以及长期速度【马拉松】。）

作为一名项目经理，这个方法帮助我取得了一些明确的数据，我会把这些数据都记录到一个电子表格中。如果看到有人连续两周的压力值都是4的话，我就知道自己得做些什么来确保TA不会把自己搞得疲惫不堪。

很多游戏开发人员就像是哈士奇，他们热爱他们的工作，如果你不阻止他们的话，他们会一直工作到把自己累晕。我们会一起做压力评估，这样的话团队中的成员就可以一起分享自己的压力值。这么做就意味着，只要你有压力我们就会知晓，整个团队同心协力、相互支持。
我们正在尽力创造一种不存在压力的环境。完全去除压力是不可能的；但是如果能够找到压力的源头，我们就能更加准确地提高团队的工作环境。

减少工作时间，提高工作效率

我们认为对于需要频繁用脑的工作（比如游戏开发），工作人员呆在办公室里的时间如果适量减少的话，似乎对整个项目会更加有利。

因此，我们想要就这一观点来做个实验。夏季过了以后，我们把工作时间降低到了7个小时（午休1小时）。大家早上9点上班，下午5点下班。因为我们在之前的6个月里有记录下所有的进展，因此要做这个实验一点都不难。

实验三个月后我们发现，团队的进展速度有所提高。跟之前相比，压力值保持在相同或更低的水平。期间唯一的一次加班是因为我们在为GDC（游戏开发者大会）或者EGX游戏展这样的大型活动构建样本，即便是这样，当时的平均压力值也只保持在2-2.5左右！

“压力”和“紧张感”有点像是电子游戏中的超能力。激活了之后，它们的作用会变得超级强大；但是也会对你自身造成相当大的损失。最好是在非常有必要的时候再激活它。在游戏行业中工作，想要做到零压力是不可能的；但是你可以努力创造出一个能够意识到成本的环境。
用硬币估算时间

在估算时间的时候，有些团队会选择用Scrum，根据它们的复杂程度给每个任务分配一个分数。（游戏邦注：Scrum是一个用于开发和维持复杂产品的框架 ，是一个增量的、迭代的开发过程，通常用于敏捷软件开发。）我们选择采用更为简单粗暴的方法：使用现实世界中的硬币来帮助估算完成某个任务所需的时间。一枚硬币=一小时。

在我们公司，一周5×7=35小时。在正常的一周里，大约有5-6个小时的时间用来开会，另外2个小时用来处理杂七杂八的事务（牙疼去看牙医、心情不好、突然出现的Bug，等等）。这样的话，每位团队成员就剩下27个小时的开发时间。全力以赴的、不受干扰的开发时间。我们的办公室里摆放着27枚硬币，每周一我们一起计划本周工作的时候就会用到它们。在我们列出了所有需要完成的任务以后，每个成员再根据自己的自身情况来分配他们自己的27枚硬币。

用硬币分配完任务以后，我们不会问：“你认为你能在X小时内完成这个任务吗？”，因为他们不想在其他团队成员面前丢脸，所以通常都会回答“YES”。相反，我们会问“你认为在X小时内完成这件事合理吗？”这种表达问题的方法可以减少任务执行者的压力，鼓励他们给你一个更为诚实的答案。

在Midnight Hub，我们用硬币来推测完成不同任务所需的时间。这种做法可以帮助项目经理确保没有人需要加班，或者有太多的任务要做。如果你需要计时的话，这种方法也很好用。也许在下一个任务开始之前，美术师只有2个小时的时间来制作一个图标或道具。

这种方法或多或少会迫使人们认真思考应该优先处理的问题。同时也意味着，你不能叫人家“在这周之内处理掉某个问题”。如果人家27枚硬币都已经分配好了，你再叫TA做更多的工作，就好像是在叫一个没钱的人给你钱。

如果你的团队成员大部分都是新手，他们可能会无法推测自己完成某项任务需要多长时间，那么这个系统的使用难度就会更大一些。这时候，作为一名有经验的开发者，你就需要根据自身经历来推测完成某个任务所需的时间；不行的话就只能简单粗暴地设置一个时间限制。比如说，某个DLC角色需要在周五之前做好，这时你也许会给这个任务分配27枚硬币，但是不能再多了。其实，生活中的每件事情都是这样的，做的次数越多，就越容易猜对！

这个系统只有在人们诚实的时候才会发挥功效。鼓励你的开发人员在推算时间的时候，把可能发生的突发事件算进去。如果TA比预期更快地完成了任务，确保你有备用的任务可以分配给TA。同样重要的是，作为一名项目经理你需要积极地与团队成员沟通，告诉他们，我们为什么要采用这个方法。许多开发人员不喜欢估计完成某件事情所需的时间，因为它们会觉得自己必须在这个时间内完成。如果出现了突发问题，它们就会感觉自己被困住了。确保他们知道，这是一个预测的时间，如果超过了的话你也不会责怪他们。

许多开发人员都“只是想工作，而不想谈论工作”。作为一个项目经理，你需要告诉你的团队为什么你要这样做，好处是什么，并且要求他们去尝试这个东西。也可以告诉他们你打算尝试一个月，如果大家都不喜欢，那么我们可以在30天后回到旧的系统。

每周五的提前规划

项目的管理层会事先把整个游戏项目划分成A、B、C三个部分，并且把所有重要的截止日期和插入任务都标记出来，比如测试、预告片、翻译等等。这些任务都可以在挂在办公室里的一个巨大的日历上看到，而它就是我们的总体蓝图。

每个星期五的早上，管理层都会投入一个小时的时间来现状核实这个巨大的蓝图。我们需要改变什么？有没有可以帮助规划出更多的细节的新信息？我们称之为“提前规划（Pre-Planning）”。这个惯例可以帮助我们保持在正常的轨道上，并且把新计划和现有计划一起带到“冲刺会议”中。花在提前规划上的时间是用来保证人们不会浪费时间，或者把已经做好的东西扔掉。

我们的冲刺秘诀

我们以冲刺的方式运行这个项目，从周一早上9点开始，到周五下午4点结束。

星期一早上：

（一）签到。每个人都花一分钟的时间来写下他们的想法，任何想法都行。我们会一个一个地轮下去，如果人们愿意的话，他们可以分享自己的想法。这是让人们立即进入工作模式和整理思想的好方法。

（二）一起查看本月的蓝图。按照总体蓝图的计划，我们这个月应该做些什么？

（三）聚在一台电脑上玩我们正在开发的这款游戏。确保每个人都知道发生了什么，并且都对游戏有一个新鲜的记忆。这样可以减少团队成员间的沟通误解，提高开发效率，从而确保冲刺进度不落后。

（四）团队内部开始讨进行论。管理层和资深员工可能需要领导或组织这些讨论。

（五）给每个团队成员分发未来一周的个人任务卡。项目经理周旋于团队成员之间，清楚地记录下每个人本周要做的事情。

（六）为任务分配时间！就是每个成员会在会议上自己分配它们的27个硬币。

（七）然后项目经理会将这些信息进行数字化处理。我们现在使用的是Favro（一款项目管理APP），但是像Trello这样的的程序也能用，或者直接用便利贴也可以！

（八）接着，小组成员再在Favro中将他们的大任务卡转换成较小的清单。

星期五下午：

签到

评估压力值。每个人都可以谈谈自己这周过得如何。我们会将所有人的压力值记录下来。

查看项目的进度和已经完成的任务。接着把这些任务从大日历中转移到写着“已完成”的白板上。这么做能够鼓舞团队的士气，增加他们的动力。

一起查看下周的发展蓝图。这个蓝图是在周一提前规划的时候制定的，记得吗？简要地谈论一下下周要做的工作。这么做能够给团队成员提供周一早上起床的动力。

积极的展示和表述。我们聚集在一台电脑周围，每个人都可以展示他们本周完成的1-3件事。基本上就是一起游玩《Lake Ridden》的不同部分。

每周五我们都会做一个“四格表（Square）”来简要地谈论以下内容：

应该少做的事情

应该继续做下去的事情

不该再做的事情

应该开始着手的事情

最后，把这些数码任务存档，然后大家各回各家各找各妈！

游戏项目的运营方法有无数种，而我们受用的东西对其他人可能不起作用。经过一系列的实验、进步和错误，我们得出了这一系统。我希望这个系统能够进一步改变，因为《Lake Ridden》的开发项目就快接近尾声了。这个系统是用来帮助团队了解自己该做些什么、什么时候做，避免把自己搞得筋疲力尽，同时鼓励团队成员间的沟通和诚实。我们认为，游戏开发不一定非得把人累得半死。

总结

制作游戏的时候，你需要考虑正在消耗的资源：时间、金钱、体力、脑力和士气。不同的任务将会消耗不同的资源。在开发的过程中想要不走岔路的话，可以使用现实生活中的硬币来帮助你估算完成任务所需的时间。不知道该做些什么的话，可以将ABC-方法和冲刺秘诀结合到一起使用，然后在每周一的提前规划会议中现状核实你的总体蓝图/未完成的任务。

本文由游戏邦编译，转载请注明来源，或咨询微信zhengjintiao

This is part three in a series of blog posts about how to work smarter, not harder, on your game! I previously wrote about how to use the iterative ABC-recipe to make your game, and why you absolutely should not crunch when you make games. This time I’ll write about how we at Midnight Hub allocate time for tasks, how we work with sprints and why “time” and “money” are only two of (at least) six resources you need to balance when making your game. I’ll speak as a producer and project manager.

Lake Ridden is a story-driven firstperson mystery filled with puzzles, developed by former Minecraft and Paradox devs, in Sweden.

Before co-founding Midnight Hub I’ve worked at Paradox and Tarsier, among others. Comments and feedback on this piece are always welcome here, or you can find me on Twitter. Midnight Hub is a five-man army based in Sweden. Our upcoming game Lake Ridden is a puzzle game filled with story and mysteries. Let’s go!

Time, Money, Physical Toll, Morale and Brain Power

When making something, anything really, you have to manage your resources. At their most basic form, your resources are: time, money and the scope of your product. Let’s cut them up and take a look at each category, so see which other sub-categories you should manage too!

Time, as a concept is kinda tricky for the human brain to understand. Some days seem to fly by while others crawl. When someone tells you got 40 hours this week to work on your game, what does that really tell you? Not much, probably. Especially when you have a job where some days you take one step forward and two steps back. Or when you start working on a totally new feature and no one is really sure how things should work or feel in the end. This is also the reason the Scrum method count points instead of hours. Time is hard to understand.

Not all tasks are born equal! Different tasks burn different resources from the team. A task like building 30 new props for an in-game house might not cost you any extra money, but it takes a lot of time for the artist making them, and if it’s monotonous work the morale of that team member can take a hit.

When making a game you (probably) have a finite amount of money before you have to release the game and (hopefully) earn back the money you spent plus even more to afford bringing more awesome games to this world! Some things burn through a lot of money, like salaries and paying a QA firm to do your bug testing.

Two other resources that you burn when working, may it be harvesting carrots or writing loot systems, is the physical toll it has on your body and the brain power it takes to perform. If you’re working heavy duty in a restaurant kitchen it may have a severe physical effect on your muscles, but perhaps not so much on your brain. If you’re solving complex, abstract problems all day in a spreadsheet you’ll most likely feel the effect it has on your brain at the end of the day.

I spoke about “materials” in the previous blog post. What are the materials you burn/wear out doing your work? When making games you usually need very little equipment, while other activities, such as refining paper from trees take a lot of equipment and materials.

The final (and perhaps the most important resource) you have to take care of is morale, or motivation. Dealing with a fairly easy task becomes very hard if you lack the motivation to do it. Loss of motivation can easily destroy a whole team. It’s very hard to buy motivation, most creative people are not motivated by money after a certain point. If you love money then making games is not really where you should be.

Killing A Mammoth

To recap, the resources you are burning to fulfill the scope of your game is: time, money, materials, brain, body and morale. The amount of money you have in the bank can be translated into the amount of time you have left to make the game. How many months of salaries and rents does that money buy you? And the amount of time you have left can be distributed to make different things for the game. Different tasks will burn different resources from your team members, may it be motivation or brain power.

Some tasks burn a whole lot more than others. This is what we label a “Mammoth Task”. It’s something that’s expensive, takes a lot of time, makes your body ache and drains your brain. How it affects morale is hard to tell. If you showed your game to the press and they loved it, then perhaps you gain morale instead of burning it!

We have a term for tasks that require almost all of these resources to be burned at the same time: Mammoth Tasks. I quickly mentioned this in an earlier blog post. They are big, complex things that you may have never done before, that require a lot of brain power, that takes a bit of time and if you get them wrong the consequences may be severe. An example could be building a totally new light system for the whole game, or to get investors to invest in your company. If someone has a mammoth task it can make sense to let them work 80% or 50%, since these kind of tasks are extremely draining. Remember, the last thing you want is to crunch your developers!

Rating Progress Inside Your Team

Our project management philosophy is to always be as goal-focused as possible. Whenever it’s possible to measure or track anything, we do it! Most people actually love to have a very clear goal to work for, they just hate planning (especially creative people!). Goals can be anything from “Get this feature to work”, “squash these bugs” or “write this blog post before Friday”. What people (especially creative people!) hate is unnecessary meetings. By using the ABC-method stated in the previous blog post, together with the following sprint recipe below, we have managed to define clear goals with our development, establishing what needs to be done to reach them and how much resources we’re burning to get there! All this helps to keep meetings to a minimum each week.

For more than six months we tracked progress made on Lake Ridden. Each Friday when we closed the week’s sprint we sat down and everybody could rate “progress” they felt they had done during the week. We had 10 categories and a number between 1 to 10 was assigned to each area. This is by no means a perfect process but it did indicate the feeling of progress (or lack of) the team was making each week. Seeing your progress and sharing it with the team is a very powerful way to increase morale and maintain a good velocity.

Why Each Team Member Weekly Publically Rates Their Stress Levels

We also incorporated a section for “stress” into this check-up. For what good would it be to score high on progress if it also meant we scored high on stress? On Friday, each team member shares a number between 0 to 5, depicting how stressful they feel their overall week has been. Five means you are having acute symptoms of stress, like headaches, lack of sleep, mood swings, elevated pulse etc.

The Estate in Lake Ridden to the left, and then 6 months later on the right (still work in progress). Progress is not worth much if it exhausts the team, that’s why everyone is asked to rate their stress at the end of each sprint.

As a project manager, this method gives me something tangible to work with, a spreadsheet with clear numbers! If I see that someone has been having fours the last two weeks in a row, I know I need to take action to make sure this team member does not exhaust themselves.

Writing down the stress levels inside a team is a good thing since the very nature of stress is that it makes you forget how stressed you might have been last week or the month before that! You convince yourself that the stress you’re right now feeling is temporary, and that next week will be much better. A lot of game developers are like huskies, they absolutely love their job, and will draw themselves to death if you let them. We do this stress rating together and it’s shared with the whole team. This means that we can’t hide away someone’s stress, we’re in this together and we can support each other.

Cutting Down Work Hours, Getting More Done

As I wrote about before, science seems to be indicating that brain heavy work, such as game development, might be the kind of work that would benefit from less time in the office. We wanted to experiment with this. After the summer we cut working hours to 7 hours in the office (+1-hour lunch at noon). Everybody comes at 9 and leaves at 17.  Since we had tracked progress for the past 6 months we believe we had the perfect environment to experiment in.

Creating an environment where people don’t have to crunch or stress is something we’re trying our best to do at Midnight Hub. It’s not possible to eliminate stress to 100%, but being aware of what causes stress is an important component to increase the wellbeing of your team!

After tracking progress for three months, we noticed the perceived level of progress was elevated, compared to before the cut, and the levels of stress maintained at the same level or lower. The only time we pull overtime has been building demos just before big events like GDC or EGX, and even then the reported stress levels have been around 2-2.5 on average!

Stress and crunch are a bit like your ulti-ability when playing games. It’s an extremely powerful thing to activate (that response was created by evolution to enable you to fight lions or run away from angry bears). But it has a very real cost on your whole body. Only activate it when it’s absolutely necessary. It’s not realistic to eliminate stress entirely when working in the games industry, but you can strive to create an environment where you’re aware of the costs.

Using Coins To Estimate Time

When estimating time, some teams choose to run with Scrum, to assign points to tasks depending on how complex they are to solve. At Midnight Hub we have chosen to implement a really straightforward method to help the team identify what needs to be done (the ABC-method) and then using real-world coins to help estimate how long something takes to do. One coin = one hour.
A week at Midnight Hub is 5 x 7 = 35 hours. During a normal week, roughly 5-6h go into meetings and 2 are used for misc (going to the dentist, having a rough day, bugs that pop up etc). This gives me as a producer 27 hours development time for each team member. Hands-on, undisturbed game development time. We literally have 27 coins at the office to symbolize this, and they are used each Monday when we plan the upcoming week’s work together. When we have listed all tasks that need to be done this sprint each member gets to distribute their own 27 coins.

When the coins have been placed on the tasks we don’t ask “do you think you can make this is in X hours?”. No, that often triggers people to say “yes” since they don’t want to look bad in front of their group. Instead, ask “do X hours seems like a reasonable amount of time to do this?”. This way of phrasing the question involves way less pressure on the person asked to perform the task, encouraging them to give you a more honest answer.

At Midnight Hub we’re using real-life coins to help us guesstimate time for different tasks. This helps the producers reality-check that no one is asked to work overtime or ha too much on their plate. It also helps if you need to time-box something. Perhaps you only have 2 hours to assign for making an icon or an item, before the artist has to move on to the next task.

Using coins like this is a way to more or less force people to think hard about what to prioritize. It also makes it very clear that you can’t just ask somebody to “fix that thing during the week”. If someone has distributed all their 27 coins and you then ask them to do even more tasks, it literally becomes like asking someone to spend money they don’t have. This way everyone’s workload is reality-checked.

This system is a bit more challenging to use if you have a team of junior members that are not used to guesstimate how long it takes for them do a certain task. That’s when you need to have an experienced developer’s input on how long something usually takes, or you simply have to timebox something. Maybe this character for the new DLC has to be ready at the end of the week, then you might give it 27 coins and that’s it. But as with everything in life, the more you do this, the better you get at guesstimating!

This system only works when people are being honest. Encourage your developers to estimate bad scenarios where things take a lot more time. If it turns out they completed something faster than they anticipated, make sure to have bonus tasks to distribute. It’s also important to remember that you need to communicate to the team why this is system is a good idea. A lot of developers hate estimating how long something takes because they feel like they commit to that exact number, and if anything suddenly turns out to be a can of worms they feel trapped, since they promised to complete the task in a certain amount of time. Ensure them that this is a guesstimate, that you’re not holding them accountable.

A lot of developers “just want to get to work, not talk about working”. If you’re a project manager you need to tell your team why you’re doing this, what the benefits are and ask them to try it with you. Tell them you’re going to try this for a month, and if people don’t like it then you can always switch back to the old system after 30 days.

Pre-Planning Fridays

As stated in the earlier blog post, our leads have chopped the whole game into A, B and C sections, along with all important deadlines and inserted tasks like QA, trailers, translations etc on a big, real-life calendar visible to all in the office. Each Friday morning management invests one hour to reality-check this big master plan. Do we need to change anything or do we have new info that can help us plot out even more details? We call this Pre-Planning. This routine helps us stay on track and bring an updated planning to each sprint meeting with the rest of the team. Time spent planning is time spent NOT wasting time or throwing away stuff people have already made.

Our Sprint Recipe

We run this project in sprints, starting on Monday morning at 9, ending on Friday at 16.

Monday Morning:

Check-in. Everybody takes a minute to write down what they are thinking about. This could be ANYTHING. We go around the team and people can share if they want to. This is a good method to get people into work-mode and sort their thoughts.

Check this month’s roadmap together. What should be done this month according to the master plan?

Play the in-game parts people will work on. This makes sure everybody is on the same page, that everybody has a fresh memory of the game. A good way to eliminate misunderstandings and get up to speed on what needs to be done in this sprint!

Consult the ABC-recipe. The team starts to sync within itself, talking about how to do things etc. Leads and seniors might need to lead these discussions or get them going.

Write down personal task cards for the week to come. The project manager goes around the team and writes down clear cards on what everyone will be doing.

Allocate time for the tasks! This is when each team member distributes their 27 coins on the tasks in this sprint.

The project manager digitalizes this. We’re using Favro, but programs like Trello works just fine for this. Or just use post-its!

Team members individually chop down their big cards into smaller lists within Favro.

Each Friday we check our progress and what was finished. We then move the task from our big calendar to the DONE-board, seen here. This is something the whole team enjoys!

Friday Afternoon

Check-in.

Rating stress-levels. Everyone gets to say something about how the week has been. We document stress levels.

Move tasks to the “DONE” board. This is a thing that really increases motivation!

Check the upcoming roadmap together. This roadmap was groomed in the pre-planning, remember? We talk briefly about what we’ll be working on next week. This helps people get up to speed on Monday morning.

Positive Show n’ Tell. We gather around one computer and everyone gets to show 1-3 things they did this week. This basically means playing different part of Lake Ridden together. We focus on positivity.

We do The Square. The Square is when we briefly talk about if there is something we:
1. Should be doing less of
2. Should continue doing
2. Something we should stop doing
3. Start doing

Digital cards are archived and everybody goes home!

Each Friday we do The Square! We do a small retrospect on what we should keep on doing, what we want to start doing, if there’s anything we need to stop or do less of.

There are countless ways of running a game project, and what might work for us may not work for someone else. We have experimented, improved and made a lot of mistakes to arrive at this system, and I expect it to change even further as we’re about to reach the final stages of production with Lake Ridden. This system is made to help the team know WHAT to do, WHEN to do it, to avoid burnout and to encourage communication and honesty. I believe there is a way to make games that do not shatter people and make them leave this industry.

Wrapping It Up

When making games you need to think about the resources you are burning; time, money, physical toll, brain power, and morale. Different tasks eat away different amounts of these resources. One way to keep your eyes on the ball is to use real-life cold, hard coins when you estimate the time something will take to do. One way of figuring out what to do can be to use the ABC-method together with sprints and reality-checking your master plan/backlog each week on a pre-planning meeting. （Source: gamasutra.com  ）