Empower your dev team with these five rules from Double Fine's Kevin Johnson

gamedeveloper.com:

Double Fine's director of development Kevin Johnson has spent the best part of two decades working as a producer at major studios including EA and Telltale Games. During that time, he's learned a thing or two about what it takes to support a team working in the perennial pressure cooker that is game development while also undertaking a journey of personal growth.

Taking to the stage to open the second day of Games Connect Asia Pacific (GCAP), Johnson laid out some of the fundamental lessons that inform his production philosophy and explored what it means to both succeed and fail as a developer.

Straight from a rather damp Melbourne, here are five pointers from the keynote that Johnson believes will allow producers, their teams, and developers working across numerous disciplines to reach new heights. 

For Johnson, one of the most useful pieces of advice he ever received was imparted during a GDC talk. Simply put, it's this: embrace your FFTs (or fucking first times). Johnson revealed his GCAP keynote is actually an FFT and explained he's never given such a high-profile talk until now, and therein lies the point. It's important to try new things in order to grow, and that means pushing beyond your comfort zone while accepting that failure is a distinct possibility. That, though, doesn't have to be a negative.

"When you do something for the first time it's likely that you're going to fail, and that's okay. Ideally, you can recognize failure quickly and course correct, but ultimately failure is going to be part of the process. So, understand that and grant yourself some grace," says Johnson. "I've been in situations where the idea of messing up can just be paralyzing, and so when you actually understand that the expectation