Mark Craig – Lucid Games Founder/Lead Programmer

This week’s lecture was held by Mark Craig, one of the founding members of Liverpool-based Lucid Games. His talk was more suited to pure programmers, but there was a lot to take away, for me personally, as a Technical Designer.

My report will cover team communication and how gaining knowledge about other disciplines can help development.

Team Communication

When working in a studio with many different disciplines, communicating from one to another can become complicated. The reason being that if a person who specialises in their field (i.e. a designer) has to collaborate with a person in a different field (i.e. a programmer), they may not understand each other because they don’t know how the other operates. However, if they both have at least a basic understanding of each other’s field, the workflow is much more efficient and will save a lot of time and effort in the long run.

Proof of this shows in Mark’s talk. As a programmer, the information he shared was directed at programmers, but his knowledge of other disciplines let us as designers, and even the artists, gain something useful. Being able to talk to 3 different areas of game development and offering useful information for all 3 is impressive.

To find something specific to this subject, rather than just "team communication", is quite difficult. However, there is one that focuses on every aspect of managing a team in the games industry (Mencher, 2006), including understanding everyone's job.

Mencher talks about how an effective team knows their own roles thoroughly, but they also have a basic understanding of a role, outside of their own, so that they can know whether the team can make something happen or not. Relating back to what I said earlier, knowing multiple disciplines can me much more important than a smooth workflow, it could be the leading factor as to whether something can be put in a game or not. The article even goes beyond the artist-designer-programmer role and into management roles and how team leaders may need to fulfil every role at some point in the project.

In conclusion, while you should be focusing on becoming the best at your own role, you also have to grasp the basics of every other role to achieve the most out of working in a team. This can not only speed up development time (and save money in the process), but it can determine what the game actually is.

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References:

Mencher, Mark. (2006). Becoming a Stellar Game Industry Manager [ONLINE]. Available at: <http://www.gamasutra.com/view/feature/130222/becoming_a_stellar_games_industry.php> [Accessed 14 February 2015].