Take Me Home DevLog - Monitoring the conversation between team members the director noticed that the team was always worried about meeting the schedule and solely focused on getting things done and ultimately not working as a team. (Created June 22nd, by Sangpil Moon)

We don't know since when, but the conversations between our team members had a pattern and the director decided to sound the alarm. The pattern was that the team members were all so focused on finishing the task that they were not discussing the other important stuff like whether this game has gotten better than last week or not. They were doing what they were told to do. This is a big problem in production culture if you are trying to do really great stuff. Everyone thought that it was important to meet the schedule, so they had no extra room to think about how to do their job better.

We didn't want to work like a factory, but this was definitely limiting our potential in making a better game. So our major concern was "how do we get the team to talk and discuss about the important stuff?".

Hence, the team decided to not talk about 'when' things will get done, but rather talk about the "biggest problem/concern the team mate is trying to solve". We actually eliminated the PM role. So every morning our team started sharing their major concerns not their tasks. If one team mate is repeating the same concern for one too many days, then it means that there is a problem, and to work as a team, others need to step up and help out.

We believe that just talking about what you will be working on this week(task) doesn't open the doors to your team mates on what the problem or concern you are trying to solve during this progress. Perhaps it's because everyone feels bad about asking for help too. By sharing about what the biggest problem is, other team mates can see if you are stuck or not and perhaps lend a hand too.

We want to make a great game. A game that everyone will remember. In order to get there, we can't do it alone. We need to work great as a team. This is a major change in production for the team, as everyone is still worried on how the job will turnout to be if you are not talking about your task and schedule. We hope we will talk a lot more on quality, quality and quality rather than just getting it done.

If there is one reason why this game was successful in the future, we believe that we will remember this date June 22nd for chaging the core of how we work together as team in trying to create the best game we possibly can.