Psychological Aspects of Game Development
Live service game development occurs in three major phases, each with differing goals and milestones. Your team's expectations and working style need to adapt accordingly.
Intro
I've been writing about how difficult it is to build and run successful live service games. In this article we shine a light on the psychological and emotional aspects encountered in each development phase a team progresses through: pre-production, production, and live service operation.
Note: if you are not running a live service then phase three will be simpler (delivery), and content pipelines may just be provisional. We do not address that case here. If you want to run a live service then your pipelines need to be professional grade to support your live service cadence.
Pre-production
Also known as finding the fun.
This is where the team does critical creative work, but also some business and organizational planning. The creative parts include choosing a game genre and core concept, architecting player progression paths, and creating gameplay prototypes.
The business and organizational parts include confirming that the market will be receptive to your proposed game (attractive, worthy of spend), and creating a vertical slice for demo purposes, but also planning content pipeline structures, team compositions, and expected team sizes.
Oh, and you'll really want to create documentation for all those things, because when your team grows, they'll need guidance. If you must shop around for funding, those docs will come in handy.
This phase is usually relatively low in overhead cost because the team can be small.
Psychological Aspects
🎲 A small team can promote esprit de corps.
🎲 Spots on this team can be coveted and some folks can feel left out.
🎲 Everyone wants to hit the ball out of the park and spirits are high.
🎲 Progress can be impacted without sufficient restrictions, which can create discord.
🎲 There can be infighting over idea adoption.
🎲 A lack of specific milestones can promote a lack of urgency.
🎲 Progress can be squishy to measure, leading to imposition of unwanted process.
🎲 Trying to get funding for the project can be stressful.
Production
Also known as implementation, feature and content implementation, or building all the things.
You should already have determined most of the systems you will need from The Iceberg Wheel during pre-production. After all, you determined the genre and the core concept, how players will progress through the game, and the target player demographic.
This middle phase requires transitioning from the highly creative mental space into building all the things you need to ship the game. This is where the core game development gets started and ramps up to build systems like core and outer loop game features, and art and content creation pipelines.
There is usually a need to increase team size to meet timelines for building all those systems, and also to meet the desired content creation cadence of the live service phase. You need hands to make the sausage.
The nature of this work requires stronger development methods: organized sprints, content and change control processes and procedures (such four letter words), milestones, expectations, and accountability.
Psychological Aspects
🛠️ Some team members will resist increased formality, estimating, pipeline formulation, or adhering to dates.
🛠️ Tuckman's stages of group development come into play as the team grows.
🛠️ Team size increases require leads and managers; some people will be unsuited to those roles but want them.
🛠️ Good leadership for pre-production may not be good leadership for implementation.
🛠️ Some people have a hard time switching to stricter processes.
🛠️ This is where teams have to manage the issue of "crunch time".
Live Service
Also known as making and delivering sausage.
The live service phase is a production pipeline. The largest portion of creative, engineering, and artistic work will be in the service of making sausage.
There should still be time devoted to doing creative things. For example, live events - often based on real-world events to leverage community emotions and commitments - need to be designed and delivered. Other examples would be new cosmetics, expansion themes, etc.
But the scope of creative work will be constrained by the choices made in earlier phases, especially pre-production.
This is the phase that should be the easiest to estimate because of the regular schedule. The harder part is keeping your team happy with the work, specifically, the potentially high pressure cadence, deadlines, and expectations from the player base.
Psychological Aspects
🌭 Good leadership for implementation may not be good leadership for the live service.
🌭 People who like predictability will be happier because sausage is easier to make.
🌭 Previous choices that now restrict creative options can make designers unhappy.
🌭 Accumulated technical debt can make programmers unhappy.
🌭 People who get bored by making sausage will start to look for other projects/jobs.
🌭 Live services issues produce stress for on-call people awakened at oh-dark-thirty.
🌭 Too few players produces stress for everyone.
🌭 Too many players produces stress for all live response teams.
Outro
Game developers do this work because they are passionate about games. Making money is important, but passion and engagement is what keeps people going.
Psychological and emotional aspects contributing to engagement evolve with each phase of development. The state of every team member's happiness can vary with that evolution if the part of the process that gets them going fades in importance.
All game development has the pre-production and production phases, but live service games require a team that can adapt to the changes required to run a continuously operating service. You'll need to think about transforming team expectations to be OK with making the sausage, and ensuring that your live response team isn't buried because of unaddressed technical debt.
If the players like your sausage then the excess revenue will allow you to grow and make new games, and the team looks past the down sides. Making the sausage is literally what feeds your team.