Effective Communication Strategies in Game Co-Development

Every year, a massive number of games get canceled or delayed. And while it’s not easy to find statistics on canceled titles, we do have some solid information on delayed games over the last couple of years. If short, there’s a lot.

And here’s what’s interesting, these cancellations peaked at the height of COVID-19 pandemic. People had reorganized themselves and were ready to work from home. But the closing of office doors has led to the fact that communication has suffered greatly, and we are talking now about large companies with long-established processes.

No matter the reasons, the point is poor communication within or between teams can lead to some devastating consequences. This is something that should not be tolerated if you are already in this business.

Game co-development is not a story about being shy or keeping your thoughts to yourself, and God forbid someone thinks anything bad about you. Successful cooperative game creation will only happen with a veritable whirlwind of honest opinions, ideas, and of course, upcoming clear decisions. Famous game designer Jane McGonigal once said the following,

“Games are a way of making it possible for people to work together in ways that they couldn’t before.”

So, truly, you’re going to have to be completely open with people you’re quite possibly seeing for the first time in your life. Surround them with about the same amount of love as you would in a friendship, and you’re sure to like the final result of your work.

Each project is truly unique. Not so long ago, we took part in the creation of one extremely large-scale one. There was a main studio, an assistant studio with floating responsibilities (represented by us, Pingle), the publisher was also actively involved in the project, and there was also a studio that owned the rights to the franchise, which closely monitored the keeping of the overall concept. We would like to share with you some communication strategies, based on this experience as well.

Understanding the Importance of Communication in Co-Development

• Definition of Co-Development: studios may join forces for various reasons, but most often because of time savings. One team has strong expertise in a certain field or with a certain platform, and they are willing to help the main studio with speeding up processes.
• Impact of Poor Communication: communicating in partnered game making is important firstly because of the large number of involved people. Technicians, designers and marketers of several teams do different work, which is aimed at creating a single product. If one team knows what people from another are doing now, that’s great. If you can establish a common rhythm of work between teams, that’s perfect. While a low level of communication can lead to a drop in product quality or even to the cancellation of the entire project.
• Benefits of Effective Communication: the main advantages of established communication in joint game production are peace of mind for the teams and a certain flow, in which tasks are smoothly picked up by appropriate members, solved and transition to the next stage.

Moreover, we now got some other interesting statistical research from Project Management Institute. It shows that organizations with high communication are 50% more likely to complete projects on time and within budget.

Setting Clear Expectations and Goals

• Establishing Objectives: brainstorming sessions, both online and offline, will be a great start to set clear expectations and goals. Organize the first big meeting: get as many people from the teams and the investor/client side “around the table”. Decide on prioritized and achievable goals for the near term, as well as long-term objectives.
• Defining Roles and Responsibilities: at this first meeting, each team member should also clearly form a picture of their work. In particular, who is responsible and who is accountable. Anyone on your team should always know who to approach. You should also have a separate person responsible for any extra situations: sick days, vacations, force majeure, you should be prepared for any eventuality. Adjustments can be made at the next meetups, but the core should be formed right away. Let everyone have their say. If at some point you realize that you are woefully short of a certain specialist, hire him.
• Creating a Project Roadmap: a detailed project roadmap that includes milestones and deadlines is critical. The team should have a clear understanding of their progress on the project. Identify key project tasks, break them down into sub-items, and give each task a specific deadline. Visualize your progress on the project using appropriate software or tools like a Gantt Chart. Update the roadmap regularly and share these updates with the teams in a timely manner. You need as much transparency as possible about the progress of the project.

Choosing the Right Communication Tools

• Project Management Software: tools like Jira (fine-tuning the task itself and the participants in the processes), Trello (for those who prefer visualization), or Asana (technically most suitable for collaborative game design) can help you structure your project and follow the plan clearly. It can be a good idea to consult with teams about their choices, or even use voting.
• Communication Platforms: platforms like Slack, Discord, Microsoft Teams are good for real-time communication. The first two can be assigned to teams for quick chats and even informal communication, while Microsoft Teams is suitable for large team sessions and file sharing. It also has built-in integration with Microsoft Office toolkits.
• File Sharing and Collaboration Tools: Services like Google Drive, Dropbox, or GitHub are key for file sharing and collaboration, and you have to use them all. Google Drive allows you to work together on documents and presentations, and all participants can see up-to-date changes. Dropbox is extremely handy for uploading assets or builds. The service also allows for easy collaboration through shared folders. GitHub is an ideal tool for anyone involved in coding. It allows multiple developers to work on the same project at the same time, track changes, and efficiently resolve issues.

Implementing Regular Communication Practices

• Daily Stand-Ups: they can really help keep teams energized. A little shake-up in the morning can be useful. You may have your own style of running these meetings, but in general the tasks that were done yesterday and what people plan to do today must be discussed. If there are specific blockers or problems, daily stand-ups are a great place to solve them.
• Weekly Progress Reports: you can communicate information to the team in a convenient way: messengers, by e-mail or by the same short meetings. You need to realize that the team can also get tired of endless calls, so it’s important to find a balance. If you are aware that a number of employees have important tasks and already know what to do, don’t overload them with unnecessary information.

Overall, weekly reports should highlight to you the challenges along with the accomplishments you’ve achieved this week, as well as the tasks to move toward next week. They are the perfect markers of whether the project needs changes. 5 days is not a huge phase for game co-production, but with information from this period you can check if you are actually going in the right direction.

• Monthly Review Meetings: this is where you take your roadmap and see how far you’ve come globally. Focus on: completed features, art assets, and levels. 

At this point, you may have a specific demo ready. Run the playthrough in front of the team and ask for instant feedback on it. Or actually, it’s way better if team members spend some time playing the game every day. The marketing department should also understand what they are promoting and overall it’s more about respecting the developer`s labor. Monthly meetings are the best time to engage team brainstorming and understand what needs to be changed.

Identify ongoing challenges, such as technical hurdles, design inconsistencies, or team resource constraints. Team members should receive personalized instructions for their work. The monthly review meeting should be a key tool in your work. This is where teams can see the big picture and come up with in-depth solutions to problems. It is also your opportunity to redistribute responsibilities among team members and generally strengthen relationships. It is best to end such meetings with a short motivational speech. Morale, as well as the general psychological state of your employees, should be at least in a stable state.

Fostering a Collaborative Environment

• Encouraging Open Dialogue: you need the ideas and thoughts of all employees, without exception. Such things can really change the course of a project for the better. You can collect such feedback in the meetings, but also with the help of special forms. It is not a bad option to create a few specialized chat rooms where employees would not hesitate to post all their thoughts without fear of being punished. And it is even better if the most creative ideas will be encouraged. A set of company branded merch for the idea of the week? Just throwing options at you.
• Building Trust Among Teams: employees should have full and complete information about the project and its problems (unless otherwise stipulated in the contract between the two companies). Employees are responsible for completing tasks on time, but should also feel that they are important to the project. Choose a convenient way to reward both small and large accomplishments on the job.
• Facilitating Team-Building Activities: a variety of situations can occur in every game development collaboration. Crunches and overwork can affect people’s behavior in a bad way. If it feels like things are heating up, defuse the situation. A day out in the countryside for all of you or a popular fighting game tournament in the office can be an option.

Handling Conflicts and Misunderstandings

• Identifying Common Conflicts: hundreds of technical details aside, trust can be a major problem. If one party promises certain features on time, hiring a specific number of people to the team, etc. and those promises are broken even once, it will be very difficult to get back to the initial good relationship. Trust is everything.

You can back yourself up at the start, for example, by requesting the details of the people who will be working on your project and asking for their names to be added to the contract. In this way, you will have a guarantee that the project is being worked on by experienced people and not a team of juniors.

• Conflict Resolution Strategies: listening without interruption should be a cardinal rule for your teams. But sometimes this may not be enough. If necessary, involve a third party to act as a conflict resolver. This can be a manager, a project producer or a designated person responsible for communications, but strictly within the company. You may also have a special protocol for dealing with conflicts. But this seems like an extreme measure when working in an incredibly tense environment.
• Maintaining Professionalism: every studio in the world has a reputation. Yes, it is quite likely that sooner or later you will have an allied game creation that goes in the wrong direction. But your employees should never cross into the personal field of other people, and they should understand certain boundaries that you should not go beyond. If a conflict goes too far, sometimes it’s best to pause and revisit the issue a little later. But a reputation as a non-conflicted company will not be so easy to regain.

 Adapting to Remote and Hybrid Work Environments

• Challenges of Remote Work: if you have a dynamic project with inputs that change every day, remote work can be a real hardship. The main challenge is the physical distance of people from each other. Cases when teams are in different time zones and even days are not uncommon. Let’s imagine if you have studios in Ukraine, China and New Zealand. You still need to choose a time slot in which all sides of the process will be available, and for some it will be the middle of the night. They need to deal with it.

The remote working format also takes away some of the information that is conveyed in the office by facial expressions, intonation and other non-verbal things. If conversation is important, make it a rule for employees to communicate specifically via video call.

• Strategies for Remote Teams: you should absolutely have a primary messenger for quick communication (e.g. Slack). It’s also a good idea to set a time frame in which people should respond to both quick messages and emails. Given different time zones, this could be both 12 and 24 hour markers, but hardly more than that. 

Strengthen communication between teams with collaborative whiteboards. Tools like Mural will be a great addition to processes. They give your people a great visualization of what’s going on, you can literally move tasks and processes around the field, set clear timelines for other employees on challenges, some have sync with Microsoft Copilot, and comply with GDPR and CCPA regulations to keep your data and employees secure.

• Hybrid Work Best Practices: all employees should definitely have a baseline. A single messenger for quick communication and a single app for video calls. Your colleagues should be in the appropriate groups and not in them if the information is not required. A hybrid version of meetings with connected parties, both from the office and around the world, will be a great help in establishing communication. At such meetings, pay exceptional attention to coworkers from remote locations.

Conclusion

Openness, respect, and unified tools for all teams to work on should be the whales on which you will sail smoothly to release. People on the project should be interested in it, appreciate the work of others, respect the original version of the game, be familiar with the current updates of it and be ready to provide feedback at any time. If you have found a partner who has performed incredibly well on the tests, but you feel you won’t find common ground – don’t get involved.

Partnered game making can be a great experience for you and your team. During unified game development, you can learn techniques and working principles from other developers. But most importantly, such partnership saves you time. The relevance of ideas in the game industry is extremely fleeting. You need to release a project as soon as possible. For instance, it doesn’t make sense for your team to spend several years learning how to port to other platforms, if there are guys who will make such a port in 3 months.

Yes, of course, there are challenges. Cultural differences, as well as the fact that the main studio actually gives its brainchild to strangers, among the key ones. But we’re confident, today we’ve given you enough tools and mechanics to conquer any troubles. Take advantage of these tips and appreciate all the benefits of shared game development. There are no doubt more advantages out there.