Guest Lecturers - Rob Wells & Chris McCoy

Our guest lecture this week was presented by two people, Robert Wells & Chris McCoy. They are both past University of Bolton students who work in the industry. Robert is a junior client coder at Playdemic whereas Chris is a games designer at 360 studios in Manchester.

The lecture today was split into multiple parts mainly, ‘life as a coder’ and ‘being a games designer’ but they seemed to flow together quite nicely as a lot of connections where made between the different job roles. There were some similarities to last week’s lecture with Nigel Kershaw about what exactly a designer’s job is, but Chris mainly discussed that the role is someone who needs to communicate what the actual game is and how it’s going to be made to the team.

Additionally Chris talked about the different ways to communicate with a team and when the best time is to use certain practices, such as when to use Google docs over using a classic game design document and vice versa.

There is a lot of information and articles online about team communication and how to build a working team, so that is what I will be talking about today. The first thing I looked at was an article by Marc Mencher on Gamasutra, he talks about building a great team through communication. He talks about finding weaknesses in teams and dealing with them correctly, he talks about confrontation avoided and making sure to correctly identify weaknesses without tearing a team apart.

The next thing I looked at was an interview with Drank Rogan and Peter O’Brien on Gamasutra, which talks about getting coders and artists to communicate properly as they are on different ends of a project. O’Brien starts by saying, “Get them in the same room and start a dialogue. This might be a meeting; it might be a seating plan that is permanent or flexible. It can even be an email - either way, get it started” He then goes on to discuss the importance of open office layouts which help people be more social and makes it easier to work together and he also talks about the usefulness of scrum, which I have personally used and think it is effective.

References:

Marc Mencher. (2008). Building a Great Team: Communication. Available: http://www.gamasutra.com/view/feature/132182/building_a_great_team_.php. Last accessed 8th May 2015.