Building efficient game design team: our experience

What the talk is about

Vadym Syvolap explains how the Kharkiv studio of Plarium built a game design team from scratch, after design work had been scattered across departments. At the start the team owed development a backlog of design documentation and had no processes. He describes five practices: a detailed designer workflow used as a cheat sheet, not a control tool; Scrum in Jira with two-week sprints, poker planning and manually kept burn down and velocity charts; retrospectives that look for improvements, not culprits; a team values session; and regular teardowns of mobile games using a template. He stresses balancing processes with a friendly atmosphere. As a result the team cleared its debt, got slightly ahead of development, speaks a common language, and the approach spread to other teams. Useful for game design leads and anyone shaping processes in a small team.