Bad Experiences

The worst team experience I had was during my second production zero project for Game History. Now things started off well enough, we all came together and thought of good ideas, were mostly on the same page, and seemed pretty enthused to work. Unfortunately, all of that went down hill after the pitches were done. After that people started skipping meetings, the artist was going though some issues and didn’t get anything in until the last week, and I didn’t give anything to one of the two designers we had so he just felt useless. All and all it felt very dispassionate, like everyone had better things to do or worry about, bar one of the designers. Witch may have steamed from our subpar communication though out the project.

See a major hurdle was that everyone had very weird calendars, with very little free time to plan meetings around. So we took what we could get and had a few impersonal meetings over the phone, but again, due to poor planning and communication errors, half the team couldn’t get in the same group chat so that ended up going nowhere. We also had very short meetings, even on the rare occasions that everyone was present, meaning we didn’t really get to any of the root issues without game, leaving it up to the individual to discover and solver those on their own. In the end the whole project was handled very poorly and while we were able to turn something in, it was in no way representative of the talent we had.

Over all there are two things I took away from this whole debacle and that is one, in person meetings are far less confusing then tech meetings. Two, always have a back up in case things get way out of hand. This second one came to late to be helpful to this team, like all good things, however it will no doubt save me and other’s difficulties in projects to come. See, that one designer I did not give anything to was also a bit of an artist and offered to pick up were our artist left off. However, I did not want to step on anyone’s toes and make the artist seem unappreciated or useless so did not take up his offer.

That in retrospect was a bad idea, seeing how our artist didn’t get in anything until week three of the project and was what probably killed all interest in the designer for the rest of the project. Knowing all of this now however its easy to make course corrections. Specify the importance of face to face meetings, play around with meeting times until something workable appears, send meeting reminders out, be the first to engage, take up offers to help with work loads (especially if nothing is getting done), find something for everyone (even if its small), all things that came out of that one bad experience, all things I now try an implement moving forward.