How can you use emerging trends and technologies to improve game project management and teamwork?

While game companies may not explicitly market their work environments as Agile, my experience in game development showed that it certainly aligns with Agile principles and values, for example, the extensive collaboration between game designers and gameplay programmers. The iterative process of playing, refining the look and feel, gathering feedback, making tweaks, and playing again is at the core of game development. Instead of having up-front design with written requirements, it's a series of ongoing experiments from start to finish.

Agile embraces project changes based on user feedback and market trends. This fits well into the iterative process of game development where ideas evolve over time. Second, Agile promotes a culture of collaboration and communication. Cross-functional teams of developers, designers, artists, and other roles need to work closely together and exchange regularly for reduced misunderstandings and faster decision-making. Third, transparency on project progress with stakeholders helps everyone stay on the same track and make informed decisions. Lastly, include player feedback as early in the development process as possible. This way you ensure the game is more aligned with player preferences and expectations.

Collaboration and innovation comes from the team having a shared mission and problem that they are solving. Methodology can provide a framework for collaborative discussion but it is not a catalyst for the team. “Are you done with that story” is not as inspiring as “we enabled our customers to …”

I think it's worth saying that agile methodologies are all based in something called "constraint theory", a concept that pre-dates agile and was developed by Goldratt. The theory states that the best way to optimise the output is an iterative method where you find the next bottle neck, solves it, then restart the cycle by finding the next bottle neck. All these agile theories are based on that.

Externally, it may appear that gaming companies have a dire business need to get it right the first time, just like a movie. But internally all they have to do is to make a big chunk of the mistakes they were supposed to make in the first few iterations.

Tencent Games is one of the biggest game provider, it relies heavily on cloud computing to scale its business globally. The game production workflow involves several phases, it utilize the cloud environment and resources for development, testing, rendering, to provide a more simplified experience.

AWS aligns purpose-built game development capabilities —including AWS Services, AWS Solutions, and AWS Partners—against six solution areas to help customers build, run, and grow their games: Cloud Game Development, Game Servers, Game Security, LiveOps, Game Analytics, AI & ML. While creating value for your mission, Partners such as AMD, AppsFlyer, Beamable, Databricks, Epic Games, Incredibuild, NVIDIA, Parsec, Perforce, Slalom, Snowflake, and Teradici; as well as dedicated AWS industry specialists and AWS Professional Services teams can help you offload all other workload that isn't your core goal.

Short answer: Throw away Cloud computing. Specially in games. Longer answer: Do you want gamers to be mad at you? I guess you won't. So, put Cloud computing for gaming in the trash can. It is the best place where it should be. The truth that almost nobody will tell you.

When implemented successfully, task management tools can up your team’s productivity to insane levels ?? I have found Asana to be very useful for short-term projects like game jams since you get a very straightforward UI. Jira has been better for longer-term projects for easy integration with Confluence to allow for tracking tasks within documents like a GDD. The biggest thing to remember about collaborative tools is to be as concisely detailed as possible. You need to ask yourself “Will my notes/comments make sense to anybody else who needs to quickly understand the details of this task?” Or even “If I need to put this task on the back burner for a while, will I understand the specifics when I finally come back to it?”

For collaboration (for development/art/sound/QA teams): - Discord / Slack (only one) - Dropbox / Google Drive / other (only one) - Version control (Subversion based) Promoting the game: - Steam - Twitch channel - Youtube channel - Another separate Discord - Social networks (Twitter/X, Facebook, etc)

Use whatever you are comfortable and have experience with: - Unity - Unreal Engine - GameMaker Studio - Godot - Custome Engine - Other And try not to stick to only one. My decision is Godot & Custom.

A big trend with Gaming engine frameworks in the near future is going to be the ability to incorporate Generative AI Tools as part of their workflow to improve project management and teamwork. Purely on a SDLC level it is already a game changer, from analysis (business process), to design (technical design/architecture), to creating prototypes, to development (generate code, bug fixes, etc), to testing (generate test data). These AI tools have already made a huge difference in my companies productivity & created an excitement within the team.

Gearbox Entertainment spent a significant amount of time unpacking the pros and cons of the move and realized that by leveraging AWS, it had a stable route to reliable remote working by providing the agility and scale needed to ensure access to systems, optimized performance, and reliable backups. The global network of AWS regions also offered Gearbox the global reach it required to ensure team productivity. “AWS allowed us to expose our resources in a safe way, without risking pipe congestion—performance is critical for our developers when they’re working with the source code,” explains Austin Daelemans, DevOps Engineer, at Gearbox Entertainment. “The move to AWS gave us the leverage we needed to expand the pipe at a moment’s notice.”

Although Game development is all together a different game agile practices remain the same. We can use the same agile methodologies and devops practice. Devops tools 1. Azure devops 2. Jira 3. Rally and other available tools can be used. One can configure devops, CI/CD on cloud platforms. So only the development is for games. But the process which is used for any Software development can be made use here also.

In case you would like collaboration across different organisations you can consider developing open source technologies. Contribution to open source can provide the magnification in value beyond your organisation.

Leveraging emerging trends and technologies can significantly enhance game project management and teamwork. You can use AI algorithms to generate game content, reducing manual work for designers. You can also predict player behavior and preferences using machine learning models to tailor in-game experiences.