What do you do if your game development team needs to boost productivity using automation and technology?

Creating tools and scripts to automate repetitive tasks is a game-changer. Not only does it speed up task completion, but it also reduces human errors significantly, boosting overall productivity. Identify the most time-consuming or error-prone tasks in your workflow and prioritize automating them for maximum efficiency.

Automation is key to be productive than working manually for hours and hours. It depends on what team or what's the you would like to automate so it can save your time, it can be either email, testing the game, or in finance team may automate their excel sheet task etc, there's a lot you can do depending on your needs and purpose.

Automation is crucial for boosting productivity, lets take a super common example: generating a build manually for a playtest with your team. It's a super easy thing to do, you press a button, the build is generated, shouldn't be that hard right? But, what if your game needs a particular setup before building, and you forget to do it, you will generate a build, wait 10-20minutes, play your game and realize that you forgot to do the setup and do the whole thing again, this over a 2-5 years project can be endless hours just beeing idle waiting for the build to finish. Automation is key, we are humans, we will make mistakes, the tricky part is identifying what can be automated in your game project with your team and invest on that.

Automation is really important when you have to do repetitive and mechanic work. It might seem like something you will be able to do in an hour, but if you can do it passivelly while you work in other stuff, you will quickly become more efficient with your time and effort. Never underestimate this. I have a really good example here. Now we have tools like "Power Rename" to rename in mass but the first time I did something with stopmotion, I did not know F2 was a key I could use to rename a file so I lost lots of time Right clicking and going to the name change tab. This, took me hours that could have been saved with that holy F2 key or a simple script and I could have started editing sooner.

Automate repetitive tasks to save time, prevent errors, and ensure consistency and quality across the project while leveraging automation for feedback and performance monitoring.

This is something all dev team use it to collaborate with each other, you can pick one of your tool and can collaborate with your team seamlessly. Perforce or Git is widely use along with some tracking tools like Jira can increase the productivity level as required. So, be confident and willing to use such tools for your team.

Version control and collaboration tools makes development of projects more easy and achievable within the timeframe set for the projects

This is crucial once projects go beyond a few people. as it is the only way you can have multiple people work on the same game. Unfortunately, there are tradeoffs for every option. For example, GIT gives you access to modern workflows and tools, but will struggle with a large amount of binary data. Perforce handles Binary much better, but makes modern branching workflows and processes difficult to do. You need to consider the tradeoffs that against what you need. The other thing to be aware of is that Teams/Studios will often view the setup as one-and-done, but your version control and workflows needs will change over time. What works for 5 people is very different from what works for 30 people, and what works for 600 people.

Utilize version control and collaboration tools for efficient code and task management, fostering team communication, organization, and transparency.

Agile is a tricky topic to approach in the game industry. When working on your own or in small teams, working with agile and iterative methods can be relatively straightforward. Agile can and will help. By breaking it down into regular cycles of work, analysis, feedback, and iteration, you can consistently improve your game. However, implementing the whole approach can be difficult, particularly for teams/departments such as Art where their timelines do not always fit into frameworks such as SCRUM. As a result, game projects that scale up can end up in what's termed as Agilefall where you have waterfall approaches mixed with agile, or just wrapped in agile terminology. This can be an improvement, but can also just be the worst of both.

Being a project manager implementing agile methodology is real helpful for a game company to boost it's team productivity broadly. So, pick the right tools and set the goal and features as team needs, keep it neat and clean, so it's easier to keep track and managing.

One thing that I have found useful while trying to achieve high productivity with low chances of error is agile. Its iterative approach gives us the leverage to incorporate the change easily in our system and helps us identify loop holes in our system by taking feedback from clients in the form of sprint reviews. Sprint are the iterations in which a team works to deliver a certain feature or module on which the stakeholders give the consensus.

I can say it from my own experience that if you want to grow, learning must never stop. This habit makes you more creative and more productive, you not only enhance your skillset by learning new things but grow as an individual too. Learning will always give you a perspective and a drive to go on and the best part is, it's the best way to grow in your career.

Learn new skills and tools to enhance game development capabilities, staying updated with emerging technologies such as game engines, cloud computing, artificial intelligence, and virtual reality for creating more immersive and scalable games.

Balance automation and creativity to optimize productivity, leveraging technology for efficiency while preserving human creativity and intuition to create original and engaging games.

Do not settle for the safe choice. Sure, it can maybe work for 2 or 3 projects, but then you are running the risk of creating the same product over and over again, which plagues the game industry. Mess around with new ideas, let yourself be creative and get this valuable feedback that only the players can give you. In the long run, everyone will be looking for this experience you bring to the table.

Innovation is the key to success. To be successful in your career, you must have a clear vision and direction because both are interlinked. Innovation leads to success, if the ideology and goal is clear. So for your growth being innovative is important.