What Software Developers Can Learn From Game Studio SuperGiant
Software, whether it’s a word processing application, a to-do list on a website, a complicated business intelligence tool or video games, all share a lot in common. We have varied disciplines coming together: developers, designers, writers, and business analysts and more that need to function together in order to achieve a goal. While the goals may differ, for example, the user experience may change between a web form application for filling out lengthy government tax returns versus a blood-pumping rouge-like video game, how we approach this process and work together is common. We can learn a lot from analyzing companies whose end-product differ from our own and investigate best-practices that can
Supergiant Games are award-winning game developers, founded by a few former EA employees. Their first title Bastion was created by 7 people in 2011. This game won awards in visual art, game audio, downloadable title, and more. They subsequently released Transistor (2014) and Pyre (2017). As of December 2020, Supergiant’s team has grown to 16 people, and their turnover is almost non-existent over these nearly 10 years of growth. Many of the employees voice characters in addition to their normal work and in addition, many of these employees wear several hats. While in a large company people are focused on a specific task, the employees at SuperGiant take on work outside their core competency. The company took a risk with their latest game, launching it in early access and keeping track of player feedback and bugs throughout the year. Hades is a masterpiece and is a frontrunner for many game awards this year, likely to beat out many expensive AAA titles. With just a core team of 16 people.
The noclip documentary entitled “Developing Hell” is a window into this game studio. I encourage you to watch the multi-part crowd-funded documentary. The success both with their staffing and ability to turn out incredible content warrants a case-study.
How can non-game developers follow this example of a company that has a great deal of success, wins awards, maintains a small team, and has little employee turnover? How can people in a company with a larger scale incorporate the ideas?
No emails on weekends and holidays. Amir Rao in the documentary mentions that the team takes breaks seriously. Despite being close to their release, he says the team is taking Thursday, Friday and the weekend off where they don’t do emails. I know a lot of people reading this will find it hard to believe. But even having access to something simple like email, where the messages are more formal than an application like slack, can take away from rest time. Modern work culture has increased our ability to stay connected, even after traditional work hours. This is both to our benefit and demise. The lines are blurring between home life and work from home life. Burn-out happens in all industries but especially affects industries where you can easily work from wherever you are. Being a stickler for a strong work-life balance can improve your team’s long-term trajectory.
Having a culture of being open to saying you don’t know something. When asked if she knows how to do a specific task, Paige Carter the employee taking over primary 3D modelling tasks, Carter admits she doesn’t know how to perform the task. What I take away, is in a room with her colleagues and the owners of the company, she doesn’t fear retribution for not knowing something. This is a culture that helps people grow.
User testing is key. Game developers have a big benefit of being able to watch streamers. As Rao says, they give unedited feedback and walk you through their thought process. For a more traditional business, we can achieve this with stakeholder and formal user testing. Creating an environment that you can share for feedback and deploying the latest build can be a key way of fine-tuning your applications.
Iterate constantly. While it’s important to fight fires and fix important bugs within an application, iterating is important. By being comfortable with scrapping things completely or setting aside time to improve on a core system that won’t have any visible impact on the users you will create more stability for the team to grow. Being a one-and-done team or handing a product off is not indicative of a quality product or a growth/learning mindset.
Set aside time to test your own application. Everyone in the studio is expected to test out the game and provide feedback on how it’s playing. While QAs are incredibly important to shipping software, they often become so accustomed to using the application things can be missed. By having a variety of the team constantly trying it out and providing feedback, this can give a much more holistic view while not taking away from the QA’s job.
Encourage “creative chemistry” between disciplines. While sometimes a decision needs to be made, often making unilateral decisions about a product will alienate the rest of the team and not include other opinions. We can see this in the second installment of the noclip documentary when we sit in on a session with the core team discussing the gun weapon the character uses. The team needs to decide on the animations for the character and two opposing views present themselves. Through bringing in different disciplines and having open discussions the team settles on a very fluid animation in the final product.
Planning is important, but changing plans is okay. The Hades team didn’t expect the amount of people who would play their game while in early access. However, they had planned releases for the entire year and had content planned that might just keep players coming. Instead of waiting, they decided to release the content earlier. By switching out their releases they were able to quickly pivot and deliver exactly what the users wanted to keep the game fresh.
There are many more lessons to be learned from successful game studios that can be applied to the world of software and web development. While this gaming industry is rife with its own issues, in particular gender discrimination and “crunch”. Many companies, notably Naughty Dog and EA have been criticized for their poor handling of these issues. But thankfully there are many smaller studios that are paving the way for the future of development. These studios are the ones we should keep watching and celebrate. Lessons I’ve learned from Supergiant Games will be infused with how I run my front-end development team.
