It was a strange department. Their slogan was this: “Cognition of infinity requires endless time”. I did not argue with this, but they made from this an unexpected conclusion: “And therefore do not work – all are one”. And in the interests of not increasing the entropy of the universe, they did not work.
A. and b. Strugatsky “Monday begins on Saturday”
Who am I, what am I sharing and why you can be interesting, indicated in the first post (link).
Disclaimer: I do not tell how to make games correctly, but I tell how I experimented, studied and continue to develop in this direction.
Links to all articles from the series In the application.
How can a young indie can react the team that is injected in the world?
In February 2020, I had 2 assumptions on this score:
The guys will switch to the remote for the main places. As a result of which everyone will have even more time to engage in the project.
The guys will hit the general quarantine despondency, and the project will stand tight. Everyone will play games – to fight the spleen instead of making them.
As a result, the truth was somewhere in the middle. The fact is that we have always worked in the team remotely. From the first day we learned to conduct the workflow asynchronously. How exactly we work and what we use, I will tell you at 11 posts, but for now let’s get back to the quarantine topic. Thanks to the acquired skills of remote work, the offensive of the “universal remote” did not hit the project. We are still gathering for weekly calls, arrange tasks in the taskter, collect information, communicate and create a game, as before quarantine.
As for my first assumption that it will work more Prive-casino-uk.org on the project: it was not there. I did not conduct concrete studies about who did the time the released time, but the project did not receive strong acceleration. Everything remained approximately as it was before. Everything was seething in the world, personally had their own conditions at the main places of work, but the guys tried not to transfer all this to the project. At first we remained ostn.
However, the general despondency, which began to manifest in many industries, slowly climbed to us. Uncertainty, loss of familiar social ties, the need to sit at home, all this worried many. At some point, people stopped regularly appearing on command calls, some could not be gone for a week and not to warn about it, and some said directly: “I am in depression and do not touch me please”. Such guys, by the way, did not stay in the team and left our composition. Partly and on my initiative. “You don’t want to – let’s force it,” – we do not work with us.
It became clear that the motivation of the team was reduced. What can not be allowed. In such moments, you need to come up with some specific methods of motivation to raise the moral spirit. And since we were already on the verge of starting to look for an investor, it was decided to clarify the issue of shared participation in the studio, through which to show the employees “light at the end of the tunnel”, to clarify the question “And what will I get material when we succeed”.
This issue was recorded from the very beginning in the charter of the project (see. Appendix), but painted frantically. Something like “The team receives 50% from the sales of the product that will be recorded within 1 month from the date of release”. A somewhat vague wording, at the start we developed it just to be.
Here I began to develop a proposal for a team in the options system (see. application). I expected that the introduction of specifics into the distribution system of buns would positively affect the overall motivation.
Having shoveled several public resources and articles on the topic of options, I drew up a table of criteria, according to which the size of the option for each employee was determined based on:
Personal requirements of the participant. For example: “I want 80% or become the mistress of the sea”. This sometimes happens. It is necessary to find compromises at such a moment.
Time in the project. I divided into periods of 6 months and appropriated my indicator for each period. This is not only a “length of service”, but also a kind of loyalty indicator.
The benefits for the project. This is the very level of the skill that is so necessary for the production of a high -quality game, or just irreplaceability. For example, if you have one programmer, then its benefit for the project is 100%.
Merit in the project. These are all kinds of situations from “bringing a smart person to the team” to “created the whole ENT in the game”. This indicator reports the level of contribution of a particular participant.
All. On these indicators, I built a model of distribution of shares in the project. Of course, given that it is necessary to leave a share for future investors. What kind of coefficients I had in each category, I will not paint. Each team itself will be able to cope with this simple mathematics. Catch the balance. I did not apply any special calculations, the theory of probabilities and other things.
After the presentation of this system and the simple rules, according to which everything will happen if successful, the guys became clearer where they go and why. Today, this system is included in our Velkomtask for beginners. The newcomer meets her and is “signed” that I agree. So far, all this happens at the conceptual level in the form of comments that remain in our team confluence. But this is no longer “oral agreements”.
Whether the morale has risen after the introduction of this system? Most likely, yes. At least we entered the pandemic with ~ 20 employees, and by the end of the summer we already became ~ 30. At the same time, there were only 3 dumps, of which 2 according to the “improving” conditions, that is, the guys found a new job and use on the side, and one – just because of the “very sad” because of “strongly”.
Someone will say that such a growth does not need an indie team. But we have our own path, and we get along well in this composition. We learned to live with this, to benefit from this. Yes, and the motivation system suggests that each member of the team, which will come with us to the moment we have money, will receive not only the priority right to employment, but also the option. Which is distributed according to the developed system. Of course, the future investor can be against some elements of such a system, but this is already a matter of negotiations.
The period that I was visible: February 2020 – July 2020.
Why am I:
For indie quarantine and remote – not a sentence. You can build command work while at home. It can be quite effective. The main risk here is time. But for young people who want to make games, this is not the worst restriction.
If you understand that the team begins to be sad, then try to invent a system of motivation, update the existing system or do something else to raise the moral spirit. And this is not just “gather and drink beer together”, there must be something deeper and fundamental. By the way, I will talk about our Timbildings in the 12th part.