
P
eople and Development Principles
Develop People’s Goals
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Help developers set measurable targets to ensure their goals are clear and attainable.
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SMART Goals:
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Specific: Define the objective and outline actionable steps.
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Measurable: Establish how progress will be tracked and what success looks like.
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Achievable: Confirm that required skills are available and the goal encourages growth.
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Relevant: Ensure the goal aligns with both project objectives and personal development.
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Time-Bound: Set a realistic and achievable deadline.
Clearly define role expectations. Develop and use a skill matrix aligned with career levels. Review progress quarterly to ensure the project goals support both developer growth and project success.
Ignite people’s personalities and curiosity; be a champion who supports both the company’s goals and developers.
Jump at chances to foster cross-discipline and team communications to share what works, what doesn’t. Encourage joint workshops and passionate developers to give presentations on things they’re passionate about or on new tools that can improve the development process. Integrate divergent viewpoints into strategy and principles and adapt when new opportunities arise. Always share helpful knowledge.
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Support Project goals
Care about who will be playing your game.​
Care about who will be making the game.
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Maintaining Communication
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Maintain informative, educational design documents geared toward developers.
Time investment in projects is important. Write documents that support what and why you’re doing a project. Projects that go into development, and projects that are investigated and put into the backlog. Let people know what research was conducted to save future developers' time.
Maintain a solid line of communication with your Producers so you can advocate and adjust not only to project needs but also to developers. Always do your best to adjust the process if people are burned out with the existing pipeline.
Handling conflict: Be specific, lead with curiosity, and be equitable. Always assume positive intent!
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Developing UX
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Start with research, identify the personas of who will play your game, set up a testing plan, and continue to validate that the goals stay on target.
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Create user flows to help scope the project and identify the priority levels of the project goals. Break goals into trackable tasks and meet often with the project developers of each discipline to ensure goals stay on track and on time.
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Develop greybox mock-ups to validate the design. Always test your smallest screen to make sure text sizes and interaction hit boxes create an inclusive experience for all Players. Playable click-throughs are a great way to begin playtesting your designs.
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Developing UI
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Always start with accessibility. Establish standards for minimum sizes, color contrast, and working dimensions. If there are design standards and reusable assets, create an accessible asset library. Support standards and documentation to maintain relevancy so the team can depend on the information.
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Maintain a strong pre-production process to allow time to explore the visual language that will best showcase your project. Be flexible on visual taste, but firm on protecting accessibility and developers’ time and resources.
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Explore and plan motion and animation to best highlight the UI of your project. Provide animatics to help your team understand timing and expectations, setting them up for success.
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Listen to Engineering and work with them to achieve implementation goals that meet UI and Engineering goals. Schedule art requests with enough time for the art department to do their best work.
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Post Development
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Have post-mortems with the developers and create a safe environment where all developers feel comfortable providing honest feedback on potential improvements to the development process. Take feedback into consideration and communicate commitments to improvements to developers to build equity and trust. Continue to check in with the process to measure what works and what needs adjustment.
Keep a pulse on what your Players are saying and take their feedback seriously. If there is room for improvement that aligns with the project goals, it’s a great opportunity to build trust with your Player base and let them know what actions the Project will take to implement the improvements.