Hangouts & Jams

as on the last hangout and had a lot of fun. This took place in the Computer Games Museum. Hangouts are the perfect place to talk to industry peers, on an equal footing. You see the boss of a company and talk to him about radishes or about a movie. You feel connected to everyone. We are all in the same boat, you could say. We all try to make games and games are like poems: preserved thoughts, emotional frozen food. You build a game so that players have a certain experience. Game designers are all of the same breed and I cheekily count all of us among this group of people, whether we are producers, programmers, composers, artists, level designers, system designers or whatever.

We may differ in the tasks we perform and not every task seems to be equally important or too closely related to the game that an outsider would say that this or that person is a game designer – but like an orchestra, everything has to be right for the song to be harmonious in the end. Every triangle has its place, even the people who arrange the chairs correctly or bring the music stands to the musicians. The conductor who doesn't even play an instrument and apparently has nothing to do with everything we hear. Everyone contributes to making the song a masterpiece in the end, one more the other less and yet everyone is important.It's fun to talk to people like that, especially if you're one of them.

We, a team of 11 people, are currently building a turn-based tactics game for a 10 week jam. It's hard to work with a bunch of indies if you just don't have a clue what makes each one tick, how fast everyone can work, what their strengths are and all that stuff. I have been strictly following SCRUM from the very beginning. So every day a daily, one-week sprints, Fridays a review and a retro. We work with Jira, Confluence, Discord and, for some time now, Codecks, as a cool interface for our test players. After more than eight weeks, the whole team is well adjusted and knows how to work with the individual tools. Of course, small mistakes happen, but I'm very happy with the workflow. Our velocity has leveled off at around 200 and all team members have learned to assess their complexity very accurately. Although the sprint planning usually consumes the whole Monday, because we work very agilely, which is why our vision changes slightly again and again, we then easily make up for the time in the remaining four days.

I recently attended the MiniJam in Berlin with two other people: a programmer and a graphic designer. The latter had never used a Kanban board before. I explained the absolute basics to her and she implemented them immediately. My goal for this jam was a small round game and therefore, from a production point of view, I drove a very hard course. We worked with Trello and Discord. In the end, we had a very solid product – the optimal result for a jam that only ran for six hours.

I'm doing very well at the moment. The 10-week jam is coming to an end and I'm happy because my team is neither overworked nor dissatisfied with the result. We drive a very relaxed course.

Do you have any questions oder suggestions? I'm looking forward to your comments! :)

Your Chefspatz