Intensely Practical Tips for Growing an Indie Studio

[Music] please I'm Alexis Kennedy and this is what I'm talking about and in a nutshell this is my motto for many years it's not a bad motto but I think this one is better and that is I hope what I'm going to help you do today is to learn from my mistakes the ones I made and some of the ones I didn't make this is my biography slide I've been making software like 20 years only ten of that is in-game Deb I founded fab other games which is where you've heard of me from if you heard of me I made phone in London I made sundar see I really enjoyed running fair better and then I needed to change I wanted to do more hands-on work I'll talk about that later in the in the talk but I went off and did a kind of Ronin year doing a bunch of work for triple A's and learning a lot and now I have founded with Lottie Bevan he's hitting the front row where the factory another studio where we are making a game which you may notice some subliminal messaging attached to which is already won a design award although we haven't finished it yet which is really nice and we do a lot of mentoring of other Indies because there are things I wish people who told me coming up so here's the the roadmap for today first of all going to talk about what I mean by growth which isn't necessarily the traditional San Francisco definition I want to talk to you about what you want out of running a studio I want to talk about the specific advantages that indie Studios have the others day of disadvantages but we have advantages too I'm going to talk about staying human because I think two things one doing the right thing is the right thing to doing the right thing is the best way to get value out of your team so do well by doing good I want to talk about why I left feel better and hopefully highlight some lessons that might be useful you universe to do you found it and I one more piece of advice at the very end it's a growth I do not mean being an ex Facebook I don't mean the kind of aggressive 10x growth you'll hear about in Silicon Valley I am NOT rich and I cannot give you advice on how to get rich what I can talk about is how to build a human-scale studio where people enjoy doing interesting work and have enough financial stability to be able to continue doing interesting work because that is key without financial stability nothing else counts one of the myths that leaks into indie culture is this idea that we are not subject to the same rules that big corporations are we are kindness isn't enough creativity isn't enough good intentions aren't enough they're really important that everybody is subject to gravity what I mean by gravity is crunch I mean you start out with good intentions and people end up working overtime which their lives I mean being one of the thirty or percent of kick-started games which don't deliver I don't believe most of those thirty presented games they don't deliver started out as crooks I think people have good intentions and sometimes fall prey to gravity and that's the last thing you want to happen to you right running out of funds is much much worse than not getting funded in the first place and above all gravity is people not being paid not being able to make payroll at the end of the month whether it's you or there it's your team if you take nothing else away from today before you write another line of code before you write another line of dialogue before you do another picture make sure you have an answer for each of these questions how much is going to cost to make the game how much one is the game going to make and when's that going to happen so I am very confident that a number of people sitting this room going well duh it's a business of course those things but I'm also very confident there a number of people are sitting in this room going ah I don't actually have answers to every one of those questions you must otherwise you're not running a business you're not making your project you are engaging in an act of faith and if you've a team that's irresponsible so you should be able to answer every one of those questions without referring to documentation there has to be the bones the things built to survive gravity so the reason that you are here today is unless you are press or in ask you've strayed in here looking for the bathroom which is on the left then is because you want to run a studio or you are already running a studio this is why people want to run studios in de studios but that's just the how it's not the why if you spend eight hours a day five days a week making games making games is really kind of broad category of activity what do you actually want to spend those eight hours a day doing emerging people coding drawing designing marketing stuff giving talks at conferences often people seize onto an inspiration a studio that they want to be like you see people do good work you want to do similar work you see people out in the industry who seem to be having a good time you want to be like them this is a good place to start but you can't replicate a studio by looking at the shape of it from the outside if you put wings and a nose and a tail and a cockpit on something without thinking about how it actually works what you get is unlikely to clock much time in the air here's a concrete example what I mean I'm going to show you a quote something somebody said to me back in about 2010 2011 there weren't a stupid person as tall they just didn't know what it was like being at fair better at that point fell better barely generated any revenue at all let alone you know fleeting happily through life this year committee it's very easy to look at a studio from the outside that has published games and there has like a website where they look kind of professional will show up at conferences Badgers and assume that things are serene if you copy there and you'll end up in the right place very dangerous to do that even you have a more detailed idea of what you want to do on a project again if you try to copy the detailed idea without understanding why decisions have been taken you can end up with something that isn't fit for purpose this was my business plan if you can call it that in 2009 when I found a fare better Nora has ten million players it's got ship story so I'll make it gay there's kind of a social Facebook RPG because that's what people are making in 2009 you have a great story so fifty twice as well and yeah so that didn't happen because I completely failed to understand why people making social RPGs and what made some social RPG successful as it happens I'm really glad I didn't because if we had got 20 minion players I'd have ended up trying to run a business at the servicing 20 million players or not making games but there's no chance of that happening because I was doing this so this is a pithy insight I am indebted to Lottie for you wouldn't sit down and say I'm making a game it's gonna be kinda like that game I mean you might but it's probably not going to be a great strategy you want design pillars you want key goals what you're doing you want reference points what you're trying to do so do the same with your business but the estudio think about what you want the studio to be and do and build it around that here are some contenders for design pillars for us to do take a moment to look at this and see which of these things apply to you all of these are perfectly decent ways to run the studio perfectly some things to focus on so me broadly speaking I'm in the left-hand column which isn't isn't particularly category it's just a list of things that I like I do enjoy the best side of things but it's not my main focus I like getting hands-on more about that later I'm a story guy and I really enjoy developing in the open I like crowdfunding I like working with the community to get feedback and to find out how to improve games I find it very validating and I find it a very clear way of fixing my mistakes on the other hand take someone like subset games who made into the reach and FTL they do great work they are world-class depths and Justin Moore one of the founders told me a couple of years ago that they are never going to run he said at the time another Kickstarter after the FTL one the FTL Keystone was successful they've been a really good game but they just didn't enjoy developing in the spotlight so they went away and they made into the reach over four years and polished it in the dark it glowed like a star and then released it which is again a perfectly except to wear of doing it if that's the kind of thing you want to do so think about how you want to approach your work there are a dozen ways that's going to get I think about it not just now but over the next decade what you want to do today may not be what you want to do next year this caught me out so always keep an eye on what you're in this for what you want to spend your eight hours a day doing these are the design pillars for far better than we iterators towards 2015 this was a slide at the all-hands end of year thing the key things here were everybody keeps their job everybody enjoys their job and we do great so the third one is the aspirational thing you put at the end of a mission statement because god help me this is a mission statement design pillars for a studio or a mission statement when you hear the phrase mission statement you tend to think it's some on a plaque somewhere and frequently it is some on a black somewhere because it's what people have compromised to fit on a plaque or the wall of an office so what you want in your mission statement or your design pillars is a clear idea of what your priorities are don't make your mission statement we are going to succeed because everybody wants to succeed nobody puts the mission statement and they're all saying we are the kind of company that up think in terms of priorities these are those things restated safety fun and profit in that order and that's important there's no reason those three things needed to be in that order we really wanted to make sure of one stayed employed we wanted to make sure people had a good time after that money's nice there's the difference being going for the kind of money that keeps everyone paid and the kind of money that buys you a big gold house these are the priorities where the factory which Dottie and I run now and you'll notice we switch the top two because we're the factory is quite well-funded and it's got a very small team so it's a low burn the whole idea was to do a bunch of interesting experiments fairly swiftly get them out of the door so we're taking more risks but compromising the safety of it in order to have more fun think about what's important for you and one of the things I realize this can sound extremely theoretical if you're at the start of your career on the start of your Studios journey if you are thinking how the can I get paid next week and then won't think about whether I would rather be safe or having fun this can seem theoretical but I wish I'd paid more attention to it in 2009 2010 when I was getting started and it will become if you are successful a practical problem much much quicker than you think so you've probably seen the documentary film aliens here with the two of the characters from aliens on the Left we have the colonial Marines m57 seven armored personnel carrier on the right we have Rebecca Jordan also you they they have different character builds and if you've seen the film you'll know that one of them gets a lot more screen time than the other because one of them leans into her strength hiding from aliens and ventilation ducts and the other one doesn't get to employ its fire resistant polymer armor or its outward facing laser ablative tile they use the way think for a moment about which of these characters you had tended to compare to indie Studios which you tend to compare to triple-a so every talk you attend during the next four days think about whether the advice you're listening to is useful to mute or to the other personnel carrier one of the mistakes I made a lot in the early days of our batteries I'd go to talks given by people in big mobile studios for example and they'd say you need to do these eight things in order to increase retention by point zero three percent I do there I would increase retention my point zero three percent and that would mean we kept four extra players each week because we're a tiny studio without big numbers so that was useless internship and a bottom line at all here's good advice is good advice in the context this talk I think it's good advice generally I don't have paradox qualifies India I don't if powerdocs no paradox qualifies Indy but you are going to have dozens and dozens of things your company is bad at or unremarkable at and a few things your company is good at if you try to spend your energy fixing all the things you're not great at you're going to waste all your energy here's the bad advice from a much more talented and eminent game designer than me for Indies most the time if you are making Nintendo's crown jewel platform launch exclusive game and you need to hold it back for six months to get ten out of ten rather than nine out of ten this is probably good advice if you are three Indies working from their back bedrooms and you're going to hit negative cashflow in three months then you probably want again it isn't great rather than a game is entail same guy great advice for Indies just because it's it's not an indie source doesn't mean it's bad advice for Indies this I wish I'd listened to I wish I'd known when I was making some Missy Saunders see we made the home port for in London first and then do everything else and it worked out ok but what we should have done and what I think it's often good advice is to get the core loop of the game the core activity right first and then go back and look at the introductory experience here it's the more bad advice from an unimpeachable indie source and I know it's bad advice I believe it's bad advice because Romney said it was bad advice when he gave a talk last year here I think Romney told a group of game design students when asked should I stay in school no you should drop out because then you'll know more staff and he went live lessons and afterwards the talk organizer came up to him and said for God's sake and this is not the Netherlands South Africa does not have a social safety net and what you just told these students you know could destroy our lives because staying school is their best chance running a good life every talks you attend think about whether it's going to be useful for you the biggest trap is this you know big studios will have a voice that may not be useful for you but even other Indies may give a voice that isn't useful for your specific circumstances think about it critically these I think are things that most Indies have in common as advantages the biggest you do is often don't you don't have to spend all the money you don't have to do all the things that big real serious studios with lobby are team you are not prevented from making decisions quickly by five layers of management you are also not protected from the consequences your decisions by fire as a management I'll talk about that in a moment you're a small team for the people who are engaged you will have a deeper bond than you will in a big organization where people only meet at the watercooler all else being equal nobody's really straightforward this is a uk-based entrepreneur who I asked for advice a few years ago what I said is the thing you would say to a studio first that is trying to grow and he said this if you put more pounds into or more dollars into a project you don't necessarily get more dollars out there is a relationship of course there is but the relationship is much less direct than people think and if you really really really really want to game to succeed it's easy to start playing your whole budget into it every pound you spend on the game or every other currency we spend on the game is a pound you have to make back in sales at the end you don't spend it you don't have to make it back always bear that in mind constraints so you will hear people say or you will say yourself something like this what does a proper business do so first of all prisoners has budgets schedules revenue projections and you want those those are essential problem is Nasir's employees you probably want employees even who are the only employee of your studio you need a team you can't make games without personnel probably companies both businesses have offices you don't necessarily need an office lots of Indies work from home remotely often the living rooms you probably need payroll you probably don't need a payroll department you probably need an HR policy you probably don't need an HR department you definitely don't need not be hard don't copy what proper businesses do without thinking about it in a tend to become a proper business and here's a really good example of what I mean press releases that looks like this and I've put out press releases they don't like this and I nod off rereading them we know our press releases look like we know what press release is supposed to look like if we want to be taken seriously we tend to put out things that look like this when we could do this John Marshall is a solar dev in the UK he's a very funny and you know you can't say this in the press release I'm not wasting my time day in down knee-deep in football without some sort of kickback we're very excited to release our own you've all you know I don't know how well keep men did pretty well I think but I'm telling you about it at GDC a year after release because he did something unusual and distinctive and he didn't just try to copy other press releases not everyone is as funny as Dan Marshall I'm not so not all of us can make entertaining press releases but don't just do things because they're done that way this is me in my living room with Sonia my daughter doing a live stream for the occultist simulator Kickstarter Sonya is explaining what her beanie babies names are and which ones she likes more because I was doing a stream and she wanted to get involved and she insisted on getting in if you are doing a stream if you're recording a Kickstarter video it's very easy to get sucked into the idea you need to look professional you need to have a printed backdrop and you need to sit there and look serious and give the impression that you're in a meeting room in a triple-a studio people who are backing on Kickstarter no you're not in a meeting when a triple-a studio they know you are one or three or five people sitting around somewhere you don't need to pretend to be a proper business this is how Carter simulator didn't Kickstarter it didn't wasn't a problem Sonya being in the live stream was a problem son being the knife stream because she now wants to be in every live stream I do ever that's a separate issue right immediacy I said earlier that you can make decisions quickly and you are not protected from making bad decisions by five layers of Management so what you've got as an indie is very short iteration time and make a decision act on it see the effects change your decision act on it again see the effects in order to make this useful in order to catch the bad decisions you're not protected from everybody has to know these three things what they're doing why they're doing it why they want to do it so your job as a studio head or a team lead is to make sure they know those things this is your number one job right it's managing information flow think about how you have managed information flow if you are designing a game a lot of information flowing companies is works like this you get an email explaining what you want to do and you do that for the next month imagine I'm designing a game where you get a big text up at the beginning of the month never refer to it again and then then check in the end of the month see where it's done so you want small snippets of information constantly you want to work and inform people all the time you have to check their understanding to make sure they know not just what they're doing but why they're doing it they can change direction intelligently which then goes wrong and here's a really useful tool for giving people information constantly in small digestible snippets design pillars safety fun and profit of course when they see a game that is going to have a modest budget in order to ensure that we all have jobs rather than pushing the boat house and plowing money into it saying with actual game projects saying with actual design that as factual games loading this exploration survival with the core pillars of summer see and I banged on about this all the time and the effect of this was when I said the boat needs to look really small in the middle of a vast dark ocean my UI developer said straightaway of course yes because loneliness is it's one of the core values in the game any kind of design pillars snippets of information you keep revisiting decisions you make up front and then refer back to for periods of time as well so last year the game sold well we actually have more money than we expected this year we're not going to focus on improving our cash flow because that's ok we are going to focus on finding bigger audiences everybody in the studio knows that over in the studio Exxon this all the time when you give somebody a jump button in the game you immediately give them a wall to jump over to check they have understood the jump button if you give something a croucher button there will be a pipe if I am trying to make sure my daughter knows it's her bedtime I will say what are you gonna do Sony and she'll say clean my teeth and get into bed I wait for you to come and read a story for me oh you need to check understanding with your team as well but if you check I'm staying with your team by saying repeat back to me what I've just said to you they lose patience fairly quickly so here are three null annoying ways to get them to indicate their understanding one is to have them explain it to somebody else while you're present this has the added advantage they will point understand it better while they're explaining it and the other person will understand it at the end of it you pick up on this use of confusion now there is to get into write documentation not the nice outcome of that is they have documentation of the end event other people can refer to and another is to build out a really quick prototype do you get what I'm saying okay let's see how it looks in the build spend half an hour doing it that's not quite what I meant that's all this out before we go further I've one of the other advantages and disadvantages of having an indie studio without five layers of management where people are making decisions on the floor day to day is there is nowhere to hide from responsibility and that's great because you want people to be responsibility responsible for their tasks to make them responsible you need this thing the buck every task if you want people to be responsible for it one person has to be responsible for it three people are responsible for it nobody is responsible for it because everybody thinks it's somebody else's job to do and they will focus on the tasks that they are solely responsible for so make sure anything you want to be done in the studio has one person responsible for it whether it's you whether it's a number of the member of the team and they can pass on the back of course they can you ask a team lead to get something done they will pass that their team but it needs to be passed not thrown somebody used to acknowledge they have the buck and then they're responsible for it if somebody doesn't acknowledge responsibility they don't have responsibility and this is what you need to make sure everybody understands if you have a buck the tasks problems are yours you have to ask for help - call-out delays that's essential if a team member has too many tasks or the tasks are delayed they need to be able to flag it and you need to listen to that because deadlines come in two kinds lions and sharks deadlines you can see coming deadlines you understand your liability for whether you are gonna hit them or not Alliance they can kill you you can see them coming a long time off sharks just as dangerous as lions but you won't know they're there until your leg is already gone so deadlines are not less dangerous if you think they're okay you need to make sure people can flank when tasks being delayed when deadlines are at risk right the next four slides or so I'm going for possibly the highest profanity two-minute ratio of a indy talk so far so apologize if ever since a disposition everyone up responsibility means that if you up on a task it's your then you have to fix it you need to give your team room to up if you are looking at people's shoulders to the extent that they don't have room to up then you are because you have paid a team for the people to do work that you are now doing yourself if you give somebody ownership of a task that means giving them room to up if you give them responsibility they will learn to avoid the fuck-ups themselves without you do carry their shoulder but if somebody up in an indie team where you have a number of self-motivated people who care about what they're doing are engaged usually the most you need to say is please don't do it again let them know they up don't belabor the point don't try to make it a big deal move straight away how the problem is going to be fixed next time there's two reasons for that one is so that the problem will be fixed next time there's good intentions please don't do it again often aren't enough if they were they probably wouldn't make the mistake to begin with the other is that you give somebody a way to save face and channel their embarrassment or their noise into fixing the problem give them room to fix the problem don't make a drama of it you're very nearly we really need to make a drama super important when you up and you will tell your team there are three reasons for this number one they probably already know number two people respond very positively to leaders who admit their fuck-ups you keep on omitting fuck-ups then you're probably incompetent and need to change jobs but if you if you do a good job except when you don't people respect owning it the third by far the most important thing is psychological safety again and again comes up as one of the things that makes teams work people need to be able to admit they up if you is the boss find it embarrassing or difficult to admit your own there's gonna be twice as hard for your team who aren't the boss and don't have higher firepower so it's ever difficult for you it's more difficult for them show the way so often this is fine often everyone's on the same page everybody wants to to make a good game sometimes people keep up here are some really practical piece of advice and how to deal with somebody keeps up don't procrastinate if you leave the problem it will just get worse as soon as you have three is a get a good heuristic for a number of things to bring three specific examples and then you up and I mean specific I don't mean I don't like your attitude or I don't think your work is of a standard though that we think we should be doing or I mean this thing happened this thing happened and you said you wouldn't do that and you did so you had a three specific things sit down with them and talk about how you can make sure things are going to be different in the future come on the suggestions about how to change stuff but listen to theirs you never have the whole picture maybe they didn't up maybe they did but there were reasons for it you're not aware of maybe they have a better idea of how to fix bombs than you and make sure when they leave the meeting whatever steps you take to resolve it there is at least one thing they can focus on indie studios are places of complicated intellectually demanding absorbing work where people think about a lot of stuff at the time if you give them five things that need to do in order to fix the problems they'll forget forward them before they're out of the room and forget the rest of them by by the following morning give them one thing they can focus on in between their other tasks so it makes it possible and practical you've got a team of five imagine five people directly I think five people is about that number you can manage directly you should be having a one-on-one with them every week when you should be spending probably half an hour that means two and a half hours a week it means ten hours a month for an indie studio head that is a lot of time if you're anything like me you probably feel the creeping finger of panic and the idea of you're spending ten hours of time away from doing the other things you need to do but look at the middle bullet point remember your job as a studio head is to manage information flow above everything else and it's to make sure that everybody else works as effectively as they can you can focus on your own work being as effective as it can be or you can focus on five people's work being as effective as it can be the multiplier effect is much more powerful so one-on-ones take lots of time but they are a really valuable way to spend your time and here are two things about one of ones that I think people often get wrong I've got the wrong in the past don't think because you're sitting at the desk next to somebody forty hours of working week a week you don't need one-on-one so let me say that there are double negatives if you are sitting next to somebody forty hours a week talking to them all the time you still need one-on-ones the kind of things they say to you when you're alone and not in front of a team will be different there are things they don't become for raising a public the kind of things they will say when you ask them specifically to reflect on what the problems are at the moment how the thing worked out last we agreed to do are different from the kind of things they will think about when they're sitting staring at a copy of you do so you're trying to get the damn bill to compile so give them space to think about what their block is what the problems are what the things in the studio you haven't noticed are what the relations with other people are what their concerns about the upcoming deadlines are give them time and space to tell you that and secondly don't skip one on bonds it's very easy to do lots of stuff you need to do if you skip it if you have to change it schedule at the next day or the next afternoon because if you skip a one one you are saying to your report you are not my top priority as a manager your priority is your reports you want to make sure they're as effective as possible talkie which mammal warmth what a ones are a really good way to build rapport I could have said rapport I really like the phrasing that more warmth because it annoyed the how to my old co-founder but I'd like the greasy feel it gives if you're working a team of less than two dozen people it's very hard to hide bad news and I've just spent several slides telling you how important it is to share information as effectively and constantly as possible if you try to hide it your left hand is hiding with your right and you probably won't succeed people who work in indie teams are smart people who work in game they're generally a smart it's an intellectually demanding job people will gossip people will find back channels to find information they'll either find out the bad news you're trying to hide or they'll make a worse bad news are they going to trust you and when you have to give them actual bad news publicly they don't trust what you say about it so be as transparent as you can at all times a lot of other advice in this talk it's not just about doing the right thing that is the right thing it's also about doing the pragmatically best most effective thing takes a lot of effort to hide information a small team another pragmatically another morally appropriate but also pragmatically useful thing is credit people by name not you know every sentence you have every time you you mentioned the game beside the list of credits because that turns into an Oscar speech every time you open your mouth but when somebody has done specific work when somebody's responsible for a piece of really great uh or UI work when somebody's responsible for keeping the backend stable and that's underappreciated because nobody ever looks at a really stable you know and goes wow that's some great work as a player mentioning people by now you'd be generous it costs you very very little it's always tempting as a studio head to get egocentric and people really appreciate it when you don't so back to doing well by doing good here are some ways to ensure that your team feels well treated and build rapport better this is an unglamorous one every decision you make it affects how your team is going to interact how the business is going to work get it in writing and it doesn't have to be lawyered up obviously often you want legal contracts but if you just put something in an email so everybody understands what's going on you're gonna clear the ground for people having better relationships some concrete examples lots of teams get going they make a game people are coding together they've got a prototype it's gonna be on Steam at some point and you there's the indie pocalypse so we don't really know how much money they'll be in it and it's a bit vague and you know will decide how that if somebody offered you a job and you said how much does it pay and they said you know work that out later and you said when do I get paid when it's paid and they said well you know it'll be at some point you shouldn't take the job and you shouldn't make that arrangement with other people as well decide what the compensation is going to be from work in the project up front with your team be specific IP assignment you're all working on something people are doing little bits of writing somebody's done ah it's all coming together the game might never be finished it might not be worth anything II haven't talked about the IP belongs to the company or the individuals get it in writing next week somebody says we I think this really should be science-fantasy and somebody else says no we agreed it was filmed wha how do you decide who's right who owns the IP one of you wants off the project they still feel they have some sort of involved with it but they do all that great art you need to know who owns the IP even if you then do something generous you need to have a basis a firm basis to do something generous with lots of indie teams have loose structures you get people who are core you get people who are salaried employees you'll get people who are doing bits of freelancing you'll get people who have stock you'll get people who are sort of hanging around helping out if you go to GDC with a colleague who's a freelancer and they want to give out business cards whose business cards they're handing out are they promoting your company or are they promoting their own freelance work both are perfectly reasonable approaches but I've seen people fight over this because their expectations are different you're at GDC you're my dime so you should be any outlier business cards well you know I need to make a living make sure the relationship is clear this one's lethal we trust each other so why do we need to put things in writing if you are working with the trust whether you found you known for years who does not and will not screw you over what happens when a close family member gets ill and they need to leave town and they can't work in the budget anymore maybe they do and maybe you come to really generous arrangement where they draw a salary whether they have played for six months or they keep their interest in the project but you need to have a firm basis to make that decision on agree with them upfront things that proper companies do and don't do things that you might do people need to get paid they're a bunch of ways you can motivate two people by paying them that aren't immediately obvious the pink ones are things are trying to feel better the lavender one attracted eleven the one on the bottom there something I wish I would try that fell better so I'll talk about that first I think in an indie studio people should know how much each other a page chicken now to doing this affair basher I regret it it's hard to share this information people generally know if somebody has paid what might seem to be over the odds whether it's because their founder or whether it's because they have an unusual skill set order it's because you had to pay them to to make them come on board more than you'd expect people want to know that if you get some sunlight on it at least people have a chance of understanding it hide information often Beach resentment lots of projects have revenue share arrangements if you're running a studio I kind of prefer having a profit pool for the whole company to revolutionary projects for a couple of reasons one is that if the company doesn't does badly it doesn't make much of a profit you can just withhold the profit pool but the other is that if you've got several projects people that work here on one of them makes will the money or one of them doesn't that could be resentment very quickly everybody gains something from from the company doing well everyone feel some participation in business when you motivate somebody about paying them giving them a salary rise is quite an inefficient way to do it because the get a salary rise and the next month that's the salary they've always had you have to keep on giving a salary rise until you put increasing their motivation and that's usually not sustainable profitable is a nice because they happen once a year because people get a burst of enthusiasm through knowing that they have benefited from the work they did over the course of the year minimum decent salary this is one of the things we did it fare better that I believe they're still doing now which I'm quite proud of we decided a number that we needed to be able to pay people for them to have a fair short renting a reasonably nice place and then able to cover transport and not having to worry too much about money we never paid anybody less than that once we'd established that policy have a junior they were so that meant people understood we had a basic commitment to our staffs well-being it meant that junior people started their careers were living in relatively comfortable circumstances and it meant that we could actually expect a better quality of work from people who didn't have to commute necessarily for the very long periods of time you might need to live in London so you'll notice I put that at the right-hand end of the cost axis because you can only do that if you're a reasonably successful studio it's completely impractical for starting out to you do but think about it talking to things that tend to be irrelevant to startups and very relevant to studios been going for a bit think about benefits it's easy to think these are the things properties companies do but the reasons people want this stuff some companies some countries it's more important than others some countries are better Social Security than others family friendliness is something it's very easy not to think about when you are starting out especially if you have a young team and it becomes more and more important as the years go on captors up with you some to see wouldn't exist if we had been a family-friendly company I was having to pick my kid up a half past three and then work Saturdays it's also a concrete tangible signal you can send the you are interested in gender parity on your team because disproportionately although of course not exclusively maternity leave tends to be a point attention in companies so it is if you are interested in diversity there's a tangible commitment you can make to say that women are welcome on your team right topic I have strong feelings on this gentleman is Alexei stakhanov Alexei mined coal and Soviet Russia in the 50s and a one occasion he put a few hours extra and he worked really hard on a single shift he mined 227 tons of coal single-handedly first he didn't of course he didn't he team of helpers the thing was a propaganda operation to ensure to encourage people all across the country to break their backs putting in extra time this obviously has some similarities to labor practices persistently in the software and in the games industry myth of the hero and as I said at the beginning all of us are subject to gravity just because you mean well doesn't mean that you're immune to the lure of crunch the dangers of staff burning out so I'm really proud of this this is a thing I posted in the snack channel and foul better when son of C was nearly done we respond very well to it the game launched on time and did well but this is the key point I could give that speech because the hay was in the barn because the game was in a place to be released if I decided the game actually needed eight more wait weeks work and we launched interiors I couldn't have given that speech 20 years ago somebody said this to me I've never forgotten the point in which you decide to crunch as a team is not two weeks from release when you say well can you put in a few hours extra over the weekend it's when you don't build an accurate enough schedule or when you don't require your team to build an accurate enough schedule and don't get me wrong estimation is hard I've been making software for 20 years I'm still not very good at estimating time but a couple of good talks yesterday about people having problems estimation difficult to do wasn't it's about doing it but first of all I want to address this it's a very tempting myth you have to bleed into your keyboard the magic Phoenix of are going to rise nobody says this nobody says this buildings are late but nobody pretends you can't schedule a building and nobody thinks the Moscone Center is less complicated in the average game I do not believe that the human body is less complicated in the average game all these are complex difficult fields of endeavor all of them people have to estimate for we can estimate for things we can build better schedules the fact that it's difficult should not dissuade us from trying because it's white line if you don't believe me believe this man googly you may see the Sun Gamasutra you or three ago money points there are crunch generally makes things worse of course if you manage to drag the game over the finish line you'll feel you saved it maybe if you hadn't crunched it would have been a better game it's very hard to say that but again and again it is all found that the 770 projects his team reviewed ones were people who crunched did worse and crunch people up look at this health productivity relationships morale employee engagement even increases the risk of alcohol use so don't do that the reason there are lots of reasons but the biggest reason that we are so bad as humans as game developers software developers and estimating staff is that estimation is something you tend to do at the beginning of a project or sprin and then you don't think about it again until your next ester something and you don't know whether or estimate was right the first time so in turns the iteration dope in terms of improving your skills it's very hard to do so fix the loop at the end of every sprinter you see when you're using some sort of agile methodology every month some other time period if you're not look at their estimates you did in the previous spring see how accurate they were use that information to feed machine extent of estimates make sure your team does the same nobody wants to it's one of the least fun parts of game development but it stops people crunching it's like flossing nobody enjoys it here were three ways to try to make people including you do it and do it a bit better first thing another pithy adage from naughty which really struck me on the first hair day you can be in the business or you can be on the business it's very Hardy but at the same time you want ideally somebody who is on the business looking at the big picture thinking about deadlines and estimates and people who are in the creative and technical trenches ideally then you want to producer or project manager or somebody who is who's interesting the best side if you're in a small team you can't always get that that's life in that case put your producer hat on maybe one day a week stop thinking about when you're going about this feature and exactly how the code is going to work pull back and look at the estimates look at the deadlines don't put it off top down and bottom everyone's about estimating I got better at estimating when I started thinking top down okay this this level will take three days other similar things are taking about three days bottom up also this level contains these many assets each of those takes that many hours add 10% for this 15% for that okay these are ballpark say let's meet in the middle it's really fuzzy way of doing it but it gives you a basic cross eternity check and any estimate it's always better than no estimate is really important the third thing is a dirty trick to use new team when they say oh no you know how long does art take and you say okay well I put that in our steam page how long does that take release date I do and at that point you know they may as they often do but so my left her better say you Kennedy I know what you're doing but often it's you Kennedy I know what you're doing okay it'll be five to ten days but don't hold me to that brilliant five to ten days it's more information you had two minutes ago also next time round he say last time he said five to ten days and they said oh yeah actually it was about six days so you know it's a bit a little pessimistic man we can work with that most important thing about schedules this 20% contingency you put together a schedule it's a hundred days hmm you've only got budget for 90 days worth of work you need 20% contingency because people say that's a good heuristic broadly speaking you can expect that kind of overrun so you put in five percent contingency 105 is close to 90 remember deadlines repeat the lines of sharks or lions contingency is tiny put in a project for the stuff that will go wrong that you don't expect you can't know it to be 20% but after two decades of making software and having talked to a bunch of other people you do the same 20% is the broadly speaking the number that keeps coming up for this kind of thing not yeah so he's recognizing so they still ah not you're a bit slow or a bit lazy or you could have worked harder but happens that you cannot predict it does the snow in England it snowed in England over Christmas alone I lost two days because have to look after my kid for two days out of a 10-day spring tell everything contingency the only charter that's are very proud of this this is head count affair bastard during the time I was there only one person ever resigned because they actually their spouse got a dream job in the US there to move away we lost three people in 2012 because the company was six weeks away for not making payroll I had to lay people off some things about that you want to retain people if you possibly can because the longer they're with the company the more valuable they are you treat people decently this is the doing well by doing good thing right if you may you build a human's do you get people more like stay and every time an employee of two years or three years or five years standing walks out of the studio they have a head full of detailed information and knowledge about the process as relations with other people understanding of how the team works all this stuff you want to keep they're happy people get more valuable to go on people will eventually move on and you need to bring in fresh blood but keep people as long as you can and if people know that you make in keeping them a gutter priority and they will trust you more sometimes goes wrong and you've run out of money here is some basic advice for the day there's a studio head you will probably have to face at some point get it done quickly do not leave people lingering give them an answer as soon as you can and get a day for it think about how not to have a colleague walking past a desk full of a table desk table full of other colleagues Island table fan of other colleagues carrying a cardboard box and weeping if you have sent people to lunch early or you have to meet with somebody early in the morning so you avoid the humiliation the last day people will remember at your team find ways to do that never say this it's not true if you are letting somebody go you still have a job and they don't and if you tell them that's hurting you more than them they won't react well they shouldn't react well and really important when you are interacting with the people in your team who may become friends you may invite your house whose shoulder you may cry on and he may cry on your shoulder always remember that you may have to have this conversation with them so Iran fell better for seven years and it was my dream job for a lot of that time and towards the end of that time I began became aware gradually that I wasn't having fun anymore I had lost track of why I was doing what I was doing I was spending less and less time doing hands-on work more and more time doing managing managers and the thing about metal fatigue and think about chronic humor fatigue is it builds up over time are you running the studio for seven years so I've been very tough I was indeed and I gradually started to realize I wasn't enjoying it and then I quite suddenly realized I wasn't enjoying it at all so I decided really quite suddenly to leave it took me a week of thinking and soul-searching having serious conversations and then I wanted out because I wanted to do something with very full responsibility doing the Ronan year I mentioned at the beginning working for artists you do and I wanted to do smaller projects was more hands-on win again we had a problem and this is one of these problems it's theoretical and sounds like a great problem to have until it happens I wanted to walk away I owned most of the studio there wasn't enough money in the studio to buy me out we did have a couple of preliminary conversations about selling the studio but nobody wanted to be solved so what do we do it boo-fucking-hoo I only get 360 K pounds there's still more money than I expect to see in my life honestly I left a lot of money on the table so that the company could continue to exist without going bankrupt because priorities because you decide at the beginning whether you're in this to make a lot of money or whether you're in this to build a human studio you decide which the safety final profit is most important and I think this is true and this may be relevant to you someday the fact you being in the studio from the start doesn't mean that you are all there is to the studio quick advice plan for it get a shareholders agreement whatever the equipment is in your country just in case you need to leave don't make the mistake I made is a typical founder mistake of acquiring jobs over time accruing things I didn't quite trust to give away so the fatigue built up keep your email addresses for your company in your home which are separate I nearly didn't come to the has to do this tool because my esta es ta reminder when two miles he'll better address on their personal address and my ex-wife still gets mail addressed to fail better which which annoys her to this day so keep it separate even if you're convincing and stay with the company forever it's just good sense and do think of it like a divorce it's gonna be weird when you walk away even if you do it an amicable turns always always keep track of this why you are in it what it's for in assertive statistic about probably the number of things you'll want to do on any given day or any given week running in the studio illustrative statistic about the number of things you would actually get to do time or resources or energy a hundred minus five so you are going to have to reject most of the things you want to do and either you can let that have my accident you guys let it fall on the floor bore you can decide which things to draw so decide which things you focus on make that a conscious decision no you cannot everything and things on it and here if you remember nothing else in this talk with the five things I think the most important have a budget already have one gray if you think you'll get around to one do it before you write another line of code never forget why you are running a studio making games for a living is the POW that's not the why if you up own it now but everything in writing and not ten percent contingency twenty percent and I said it's a beautiful message we probably have time for one or two questions if you'd like to ask Alexis a question please come to the mic in the middle there and I have one myself come so on your list of new priorities if the hands-on auteur kind of thing for your new for your new studio does that mean that you're trying to hand off more of the studio head kind of things to other people in the team so you can do more of the you know direct design direct hands-on work so right now what I'm doing is is the team is on this stage and in the front row there's two full timers and half a dozen freelancers so we're working more with freelancers which keeps the studio small and it means that there's less management involved in the longer term I want to grow and I think yes one of the mistakes I made a fail better was not handing in our often uh I was a little bit of a benevolent autocracy and I think what I said about giving people responsibility also applies to management's ability okay you go ahead I you mentioned one on ones being a really important thing yeah sitting down taking time with people can you give me like an example like one or two examples of questions or topics that you brought up that yes so there's two there's two things you should do and this will basically get you three three questions really what is one of the house things and but the two questions to ask people are what problems do you have right now because everybody has problems and everybody who if they don't have problems doing anything they want to talk about them it's ask people what problems they have what's stopping them doing their job and asked them the problems we talked about last week that we agreed these things to fix how did that work out because it's very easy to forget doing that's very easy not to plan for inner ones and just just kind of say how's things what are the problems and then people feel like they mentioned the same problems a week to week and you don't address them so specifically address the things you raised the previous week okay thank you I had a question about up you talked a lot about the idea of being comfortable saying when you out but on the the flipside of being comfortable being able to tell somebody like you know you up don't do it again kind of thing my experience shows that up is never black and white and there's a lot of gray areas where somebody doesn't think that they up but you think that they up and that kind of that whole realm of gray areas just curious about your thoughts on that my thoughts are it's a whole other talk honestly okay I was aware that's a simplification as I did that slide and I was rehearsing it I was very conscious of it but it's the the key point I think that you have to be open about this stuff is the most important bit but you're absolutely right you may be wrong when you think somebody's up you both may be going different direction you may not have the whole picture all this sort of stuff and yeah whole other tool could everything useful say over the next two minutes I think being open yeah I think that's it really is it is people have to be able to to talk about this stuff and the moment the moment anybody feels criticism is shuts down no nobody feels that it's not possible to point out things being wrong that's when the studio starts to rock from the feet are if you have further questions for Alexis please come up to the front and if we need to we can take it to a wrap up room and make sure that you fill out your email surveys to give Alexis feedback on his talk but before we go let's give one less round of applause [Applause]

Channel: GDC

Views: 74,147

Keywords: gdc, talk, panel, game, games, gaming, development, hd, design, weather factory, alexis kennedy, failbetter, sunless seas

Id: MDYh2mnDCIM

Length: 62min 50sec (3770 seconds)

Published: Wed Jul 18 2018