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23 Practices to Improve Small Team Culture

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Gear Up! Advanced Game Development Practices  has 23 practices that improve team bonding and communication. 360 Reviews Have teams review their peers frequently and regularly 20% Time Set aside some time to explore and re-focus Ask Powerful Questions Ask questions that drive thoughtful answers Demo Iteration Energize a team by letting them have some fun on their own Effective Postmortems Diagnose issues that have emerged and provide a clear plan to fix them Elephant In the Room Identify the biggest problem quickly and address it Free Day/Free Week Reward hard work with creative time Group Confession Encourage the team to be more open, less proud and more willing to learn from fails Lighten the Mood Don’t punish people for making mistakes - It’s how we often learn Love Card Wall Build team culture by sharing moments of respect and appreciat
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15 Practices to Improve Iterations/Sprints

Gear Up! Advanced Game Development Practices  has 15 practices alone on how to improve the effectiveness and productivity of your iterations/sprints. Burndown your PBIs Measure your daily progress adding features into the game Estimate in Days not Hours If hour estimates are too precise, don’t use them Feature Flow Cards Manage workflow on a cross-discipline feature that requires some hand-offs Fix-it Friday Manage debt by setting aside every Friday to fix, polish and fine tune the game Iteration Reviews Celebrate the amazing accomplishments of the team Priority Status Board Create transparency for iteration priorities Sprint Day Review, retrospect and plan the next sprint in a day! Swim Lanes Create, visualize and track a work category for solving urgent requests The "Done Done" Column Elevate the role of quality in your iterations Th
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Beachhead a New Practice

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Often, large groups are hesitant to roll out change. I recently visited a team that releases a large sports title every year. The title always does well in the market, but it comes at the end of months of crunch and compromise. They know it needs to change, but doing something that would cause them to miss their sport's season start would be disastrous. I recommended a practice from Gear Up! Advanced Game Development Practices , called "Beachhead a New Practice", included below. ---- Beachhead a New Practice Most practice improvements are small and incremental, but sometimes bigger, more risky leaps are what is needed. It’s even riskier when you ask the entire studio to make the change at once. Examples of such changes could be: Reseating teams into an open cross-discipline space Adopting unit testing and continuous integration Pairing on all or most of the work Swapping out a major part of an asset production pipeline Beachheading is named after the mi
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Gear Up! - Reading Roman Voting

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By  Grant Shonkwiler Today we read and discuss Roman Voting. This is a quick and fun way to get a feel for what the team is thinking of an idea, or the current project. Check out the video below for the reading! Gear Up! Advanced Game Development Practices
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The Loaf of Questionable Freshness

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Summary - Some practices are meant to catch problems before they get too far. Don't make the mistake of having these practices humiliate or punish people.  Assume they are human, didn't mean it and have some shared laughs. --- The practices collected in Gear Up! come from decades of experience, some painful, some that turned out fun in the long run. One such practice called “Lighten the Mood” came from the development of Midtown Madness in the late nineties at Angel Studios when we were struggling to keep the game from being continually broken. Often when a commit breaks a game, it's because someone ignored established testing practices.   We didn’t have extensive build testing automation then. We had a dedicated PC, the “build monkey,” where any change committed had to be tested separately following every commit. Verifying the build on the build monkey could be a tedious task. Some people occasionally found excuses to skip it, sometimes to the detriment of the team.
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Gear Up! - Reading The Review Bazaar

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By  Grant Shonkwiler Today we read and discuss The Review Bazaar practice. This is an excellent practice for larger teams to show off what they are doing to each other. It's a fun way to show parts of the project in interactive ways as opposed to just showing each other videos. Check out the video below for the reading! Gear Up! Advanced Game Development Practices
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Gear Up! - Reading the Silent Hour

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By  Grant Shonkwiler Hello again friends, today we read and discuss the Silent Hour practice from Gear Up! This practice has served me well on all types of teams, from small to large, this practice allows for the team to really focus on work for a good hour a day. It's all about providing time for people to enter and stay in flow.  Gear Up! Advanced Game Development Practices
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