Ryan Doyle I’m standing in front of a wall covered in photographs of people, and I’m looking for Brett. I don’t know what he looks like, I don’t know where he sits, and I don’t really know what he does but we’re supposed to be making a game together. This seems a little unusual, considering how it all began. When I left university I was particularly lucky to find a job with Criterion Games, at the time a relatively small studio. As a fresh-faced and innocent young university graduate it was ball-shrivellingly terrifying to start a job making games with a group of mid-twenties hard drinking, hard smoking gamers who break their own noses on bouncy castles and regularly strip when under the influence. It turned out to be a lot of fun.
There was a downside. I joined the same day as Sean. Little did I know that in years to come we’d form Hello Games and I’d be spending most of my waking hours in a 10 foot square room with him, wishing I’d taken the blue pill.
When we started at Criterion it employed around thirty developers and I could name them all. Upon leaving there were upwards of two hundred and fifty and I didn’t recognise half of them. Hence the need for a wall of photographs, and how I found myself making a game with a bunch of people I had never even met.
Moving from last-gen consoles to this gen has changed what it means to work in a games company. With the increase in quality, production values and scope of games, the size of the teams had to increase. The first Burnout was made by a team of ten; Burnout 5 had a couple of hundred on the credits.
When you work on a team that big everything changes. Games programmers tend to be pretty good at what they do - the Ferraris of the programming world, if you will. Put a 150 Ferraris on a race track, though, and one thing is sure to happen - everyone immediately goes in the wrong direction really, really fast and causes a spectacular pile up.
So we had to adopt methodologies that could support this burgeoning machine. We spent a lot of time planning and a lot of time in meetings. In fact, I spent most of my time just trying to get people to slow down, and I guess I started to forget how small teams were ever able to get anything done. Which made leaving Criterion such a scary time for me.
Things at Hello Games aren’t as different as you might think though. For instance, Sean is still a dick and I am still awesome. Also, we’ve adopted a number of practices or at least recognised aspects from the big team experience that have helped immeasurably.
One of these being how important communication between teams is. So even with four of us, we still have meetings. They may happen in the pub, or the local greasy cafe, they may involve giggling and illustrations using toast and runny egg, but they still happen. Miscommunication is just as disastrous for a small team and it takes a daily team effort to ensure Dave isn’t going off on one. Again.
Another priority for a team of any size is keeping productivity consistently high. For instance, if an artist requires a programmer’s help every time she wants to see a new model in game, while it only affects two people, it affects two people, and that’s half our little team.
At Criterion I used to spend a lot of time trying to keep a team of fifty artists happy. It come as a shock, but now there’s just the one, it’s actually more important than ever to interpret his infantile crayon scribbles correctly. I jest of course; Grant ate the crayons we gave to him. (As I write this he’s chasing the pointer around on Sean’s monitor.)
For the first time, every decision we make regarding the game is 100 per cent up to us: we are behind the steering wheels of our four Ferraris (well, a Toyota in Sean’s case), going flat out and desperately screaming instructions to one another. Hopefully we won’t careen wildly out of control and die in a blazing fireball of lost hopes, shattered dreams and Grant’s flaming beard.
There is the sudden profound realisation that we have nothing to hide behind; we are, if you’ll forgive the unsettling imagery, naked. Coming from a big company, it’s a culture shock. While I love being in an intimate and creative atmosphere where we are the makers or breakers of our own destiny, I wouldn’t be here without having been there first.
When released, Joe Danger will compete for peoples’ time against games made by teams a hundred times the size, and it sometimes seems foolhardy. But when it does, I like to remember teams like the Ghostbusters, or perhaps the A-Team. Just look what they achieved. Right now I picture us locked in a warehouse, surrounded by baddies. Luckily Dave has noticed some assorted piping, Sean’s eying up a box of ball bearings and Grant just found a welding torch. Cue music.