Willem Delventhal

My favorite teams have always been a collection of seniors, each capable of making their own decisions. When I say "senior" by the way, I don't always mean senior in years of experience. I more mean capability of autonomy. By handing off ownership to multiple people, and delegating tasks, you not only lessen the load on any individual, but you gain the unique talents of each contributor. You of course need some cross communication and collaboration, but even in this case, the individual should know what they own, and are more seeking feedback and iteration than anything else. Give it a shot on your next project!

Goal setting is your best tool for creative decision making. And secondarily, a good old fashioned hierarchy. Before ever ideating, your team should settle upon objectives and constraints for the game. A few objectives should be classic metric based ones. "We want X sales" or "We want to learn Y new skill" etc. But focus more on Gameplay Pillar-like goals. "We want to portray the darkest timeline," or "We want the player to cry with joy at the end." Once these types of goals are set, decision making becomes way easier. Will an FPS make the player cry with joy? Probably not as well as a narrative RPG. And if all else fails, have your areas of ownership and hierarchy clear. "We can't agree, what do you think Creative Director?"

Body language and especially the way you actually communicate is how humans decide whether or not to trust you. There's this wonderful scientific study out of China that showed how monkeys convince each other of where to move the troop. They found that hierarchy has little to do with it, and instead it is body language, and especially the intensity or passion of the convincing that seems to work. When you speak about your game, speak with confidence. Use shorter language. No need to explain, your game is awesome. Talk about the good stuff, no need to focus on the weaknesses unless asked. And have real, genuine, researched reasons to have that confidence. This, in my opinion, is what most sells a design when the designer is present. ✨

I disagree with the sentiment of this entire article, and decided to use this section as a way to describe an alternative. My favorite piece of leadership advice I've ever received was this: "A leader's job is to unblock their team." As a leader, especially a creative leader, yes you give some input into what the game is, and often make some high level decisions. But "assertiveness" implies that you'll push for your way most of the time. And that's just a bad way to lead. We have teams for a reason. By instead fostering the growth and unique magic of each of your team members, you make a mixing pot of creative potential that leads to better games. So don't be assertive. Be confident, yes. But instead be *flexible* with your team.

They say that when you listen to a lecture you only retain about 5% of the information. That number is significantly better if you practice doing it, with about 75% of information retained. But even better than that, is teaching the lesson yourself, with the retention jumping to about 90%. Spend a moment next time you fail to ask yourself what you can learn from this experience. Examine the failure, and the potential solution. And then ask yourself what wisdom you can bring to others from this failure. Put that wisdom in a content format that works for you, wether a video, article, live lesson or whatever else, and discover that the corrective lessons sink in far more deeply. Plus, it's a great way to build clout, and give back. ✨

There's a couple things publishers want to see out of a potential team. A strong pitch, some market analysis with a promising looking group of players, and very much so: a prototype. Before pitching to publishers, especially if you are a new studio without much clout yet, prepare what we call a "vertical slice." You can imagine a vertical slice like a piece of a cake, where the whole cake is the whole game we will eventually build. You can tell it's a good cake just from eating that slice. So show the publishers how incredible your game could be in a low fidelity, low cost way. Our number one risk as devs is we make a game nobody wants, a game that's just not fun. So prove to them you have something fun, and they might just bite.