Death to meetings: Rethinking teamwork in remote game development
For decades, game development was done by groups in shared physical spaces. How we interact is ingrained in our psyches and partly defined by the physical spaces we inhabit, as we've seen in the array of weird, wonderful, and playful office designs that are commonplace in the industry.
After the COVID-19 pandemic closed offices, some corporations are now trying to get employees back to the office, or even mandating it, as Activision Blizzard did earlier this year. But will it work? Will it end the missed deadlines that have been blamed on an increasingly distributed workforce, or the productivity losses that can sometimes occur?
The data suggests not, with Fortune reporting that "US productivity jumped in the second quarter of 2020 as offices closed [due to the pandemic], and stayed at a heightened level through 2021." The subsequent drop in productivity has coincided with many being returned to office work.
All these discussions got me returning to our vision for nDreams Elevation. We believe a fully 'virtual' team can scale effectively in creativity and delivery, without compromising collaboration, quality or efficiency. Here's how we've attempted to establish this in our studio, and some approaches that we think others can learn from.
Establishing a fully remote studio is an opportunity that really demands to be seized. A real study into what you want to achieve and an analytical approach to processes that either help or restrict those goals is essential.
Take meetings. When handled wrongly, these can be divisive, calendar-eating time sinks. What is a meeting? Broadly, it's a gathering of people in a shared space to discuss a particular topic. For years, that shared space was a physical one – a meeting room –
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