To everybody working in teams!
I'd like to hear about your teams. How big is the team? Do people specialize or does everyone do everything? Do you work remotely or do you physically meet up? Do you have a leader or is it anarchy?
In our case, there's three of us: the programmer, the designer and the musician. The role division between the programmer and the designer is not super strict, as they have some overlap skill-wise, whilst the musician handles everything sound related and nothing else (beside playtesting and commenting).
All of us spent the entirety of the jam in a single apartment, working, eating and sleeping together, which we feel really eases communication and keeping everyone on the same page. The programmer and the designer sit across each other, as they both work with Unity and often have to communicate, whilst the musician is standing at the opposite side of the room with headphones on shouting at his gear. Whenever anyone wants someone's opinion, we are all nearby, and get a lot of feedback from each other all the time. If anyone wants to call for a meeting (e.g. "I honestly think we should delete the entire level we made because it looks like shit and yes I know it's two hours 'till submission" type of thing, this actually happened Sunday evening), we all grab a drink and discuss on the balcony.
We also call n a couple of friends mid-jam to come and have a drink with us to get them to test the current version and get some fresh feedback, as well as to help us take our minds off of it for an hour or so. As soon as those people leave we are back to work.
We find this entire arrangement is very conducive to actually making a jam game, and it would be hard to imagine having to coordinate remotely. How do you guys pull off working remotely?
Also, while a team of four or maybe five seems imaginable, anything larger than that seems like it would devolve into total chaos. How does one manage a team that size?
Finally, the three of us being friends since high-school, we don't have any sort of hierarchy, but try to make decisions democratically. This is sometimes slow and leads to unnecessarily long debates , but it just couldn't be any other way. I'd like to hear if there was a team taking part in this jam that had a hierarchy within itself.
Tell us about your team dynamics and coordination! Maybe we can all learn a lesson from each other!
Finally, as tired as I am of self-promotion, we do need more ratings and genuinely think this game is fun, so feel free to check it out! Or don't, no hard feelings.
https://itch.io/jam/gmtk-2019/rate/463231
