Open Doors and Clear Minds: The Optics of Shared Spaces on Game Development Teams
A key role of a game producer is to be an active and available set of ears for your team. As a producer, I ensure to make it known early and often that team culture and well-being is my top priority. My preferred way to achieve this is through fostering a respectful attitude among team members and leads and instituting a foundation for meaningful, one-on-one dialogues. I find that by initiating the practice of emotional check-ins at the start of production, you pave the way for your team to have the confidence to come to you should future troubles arise.
I saw the benefits of this practice fairly early in my current project. During the Proof of Concept stages, a group of developers individually came to me with their various concerns about production. None of these issues were specific to the game’s design, nor were they universally directed toward an individual. Rather, it was a general sense of frustration with the development process. Everyone had unique and valid observations, but I knew I had neither the bandwidth nor authority to solve each issue one by one. This begged the question: were there any broad solutions that could alleviate the tension?
Using inductive reasoning, I had to find a common thread across these complaints and determine the best course of action. After going through my notes, I discovered a recurring culprit: communication and connectivity. Developers felt they received major updates too late and that their observations and concerns were shut down too early. Sub-teams were feeling siloed and fractured from their leads and teammates. We determined the solution was not only increasing the frequency of communication opportunities but also restructuring our physical space to foster them.
The space in which development occurs can affect a team as much as those who inhabit it.
To understand our situation, it helps to understand the layout of our capstone room:
In the “Blue Studio” (right) sit the art, UI/HUD, and world development teams. The AI behaviors, player mechanics, and systems teams work in the “Green Studio” (left). In between the two studios is the “Huddle Room”, a centralized hub for leads meetings, design reviews, and scrums of scrums.
Finding the right balance of personalities and smoothing the communications pipeline between the two rooms was, and to some extent remains, a challenge. Early in pre-production, some developers even campaigned for getting the full team of 22 into a single studio room. While it would’ve been plausible, the space would have been tight, and the potential distraction of crammed tables didn’t seem worth the experiment. The team ultimately agreed that spreading out and making use of the two studios was a more productive use of our available space. The unspoken fear of “distraction”, however, lead to an unintentional series of choices that began to silo and isolate the team from itself. Physical and emotional barriers began to form. The greatest culprit was not a single person — rather it was how a single space was used.
During this period, we as leads kept the doors between the huddle room and the studios regularly closed. We felt that meetings in the huddle room could be more efficient without inviting in poking heads or wandering contributors. While the process may have been smoother from the top, those not in the room felt left out, shelved, or ignored. Once we considered the feedback from disgruntled teammates and realized the negative optics we were advocating, we made the decision to keep all our leads meetings open to the public, closing the doors only when discussing personnel concerns or weighing high-level design changes. We also established more “shared conversation spaces”, such as adding a hot tea station.
An “open door policy” is more than open doors, it’s an openness to listen to others and give others the platform to listen to you.
Beyond literally keeping the doors open, our leads team adopted a policy of open conversation. Level design feedback, for instance, was initially kept between the lead designer and the chief owner of a given level. Under our new structure, we began to invite all potentially interested parties. If Level 2 was getting design reviews, the designers of Level 3 and Level 1 were now welcome to sit in and compare. These meetings are not mandatory for the other designers — nevertheless, their attitude to the project has since evolved as they are welcomed in and have experienced the benefits of enhanced transparency.
The same was accomplished for interdisciplinary topics as well. Software developers and artists are given the same opportunity to sit in each other’s dialogues. The AI behaviors team, for instance, now benefits from more regularly seeing how the enemy character models are coming together and can offer meaningful feedback along the way. (e.g., “That tail looks neat, but how will it clip with the level’s geometry?”). The 5–10 minutes lost in conversations are made up by a stronger sense of team unity and universal understanding.
Have these conversations hit the moment-to-moment efficiency of the team? Perhaps. But the long-term benefits of ironing out key details in a timely fashion are already evident. Most importantly, team members feel less excluded from one another. A communal sense of co-development has reemerged as faith in the project has improved. While this kind of open-door policy may not work for every team at every size, it has proven useful for this current project. I recommend that any team lead, producer, or manager give pause to measure the current levels of transparency on their teams and see if and how it could improve. Simple optics and rearranging the room can go surprisingly far.
