A Game Designer’s Lore

In my first article in the series “Managing Student Game Projects” I will try to analyze the anatomy of student game projects. At the end of this article I hope to provide you an overview of the main differences between student (game) projects and projects in companies.

Classification

At first it is neccessary to define the scope of some phrases I’ll be using throughout this series.

I will use the term “project” to describe an endeavor that is defined by the parameters time, goal and people. A project is generally a temporary endeavor with a set final date. Until then a pre-defined objective has to be achieved, generally creating a product or service. This output is delivered to a customer and the process of creation involves one or more people.

Another term I will use often is “team”. A team consists of at least two people working together for a special purpose. In this series of articles this purpose will be a game project. I will focus on bigger sized teams with at least 5+ members since such a team actually needs some kind of management. Mostly everything will be applicable to smaller teams, too, but it may not always be neccessary.

By “management” I mean the activities of planning, organizing, leading and controlling both the team and the project. With bigger teams it is advised to have one person dedicated to management. In smaller teams it may be reasonable to have one member do the management aside the normal work.

When talking about “students” I refer to people that are currently attending classes or courses at some school or university for the bulk of their time. A lot of the topics in these articles may apply to hobbyist projects or even independent projects, too, but my focus is on students explicitly.

Finally, the term “game” is used mainly for a piece of interactive software somehow providing entertainment. Again, I only want to point out the articles’ focus.

Analysis

The differences between student led projects and company projects derive from a wide range of issues. Some will merely have any impact on project management, others may have tremendous consequences.

First of all there are some rather obvious differences:

• Students generally won’t get paid for their project work, employees do.
• Students have to work on projects in their spare time, employees do it during their working time.
• Students do not have set working times, employees do.
• Students are hierarchically coequal, companies have a hierarchical structure, even if it is very flat.
• Student projects lack a real customer, companies always have a customer (even if they are the customer themselves).

But there are also some differences that are not this obvious:

• Students’ resources are strictly limited, companies are rather able to invest in projects.
• Students lack experience, companies have at least some “senior” employees.
• Student projects rarely have any legal framework, companies contract most of their issues.
• Students have no obligation after a project is finished, employees still work together at their company.

All told, you can see that student projects differ from company projects mainly by various deficiencies. These lead to various problems special to student projects.

First of all the project manager is restricted by the ways he can induce motivation since there are no monetary incentives or long-term achievements like career advancement. Second to that insecurity increases as it is uncertain that the project will ever suceed under the given circumstances. Also it is a double-edged sword that students normally have nothing to lose when the project fails. On the one hand this leads to a higher readiness to assume a risk. This may result in a neglect of risk management which is essential to a project’s success. On the other hand the nothing-to-lose-attitude may lead to reduction of determination when the project gets to a critical point and requires some gritty decisions to get back on track. The lack of authority due to the equality among the team members can cause lots of exhausting delays with the decision making. It may even lead to displeasure within the team when decisions only consist of compromises which threaten the project’s vision to become softened up.

These problems obviously pose a risk to the success of the project. Therefore you need to be especially aware of them besides the “normal” problems and challenges you will face when trying to realize a project in general. Now that there is a basic understanding of the differences between student and company projects and some problems deriving from that, I would end this article with a note: I recommend having some basic knowledge about project management in general as well as with software projects in special when reading this series of articles since I will mainly focus on solutions and tools that help with managing student projects and avoiding the described problems in my future articles in this series. One book I can recommend for software projects is “Software Project Survival Guide” by Steve McConnell. For a short introduction to team and conflict management take a look at “Team- und Konfliktmanagement” by Udo Haeske, although it is only available in german language.

Feel free to comment on this and other articles, I would really appreciate any feedback and critique.