How to build a place for “Game Design” talks in your team?

How to build a place for “Game Design” talks in your team? Some tips for beginners. 📒😼✨

No matter if you work in a big corporation or in an indie studio, sometimes you may find yourself thinking: “it may be nice to talk about game development”. About design solutions in other games, market news, features decompositions and so on, maybe even with presenting something big in the process, like at a proper conference. And sometimes you may be in the situation when your boss wants it.

For sure it should be not another local kitchen talk, but kind of “process”. I don’t have a simple answer on how to build the thing, but here some basic advice:

1. Find and empower similar activities in your team. Writing articles, researching games, presenting – usually there is already somebody who is working on it, but just too shy or unaware to share it. If they can continue doing it – great, if it is possible to scale it up – even greater.

2. Do not build the “Design talks” based on orders. It should be based on creativity and initiative, not on sheer “we need it for knowledge sharing” (or “team building”). If people will just do what they are told and not be able to catch an idea behind it – the activity will be dead soon enough.

3. It should be obviously beneficial for the team members. It may be just for fun, or for the ability to share thoughts with each other. In any case people should find that benefit by themselves, on a personal level.

4. It should be “legal” to participate in terms of personal time and workload. There should be some free time for the activity and time to prepare topics and materials for the presenters. Otherwise activity risks being too unsustainable.

5. Better to find the format of meetings and activities that the team can keep regularly like a hobby. If it is hard to support, it should be simplified. If it is impossible to make it with proper preparation (e.g. for talks about news, mechanics, tools…) – you may switch to more live-oriented format and improvisation elements. Or even just play some trendy games or go get some snacks party.

6. “Design talks” can be built as proper corporate activity, with invited speakers, schedule, work around brand and corporate values. That way is often well-received by team members, but will cost more resources and some people will support that activity as part of their full-time work. Not every company is able to choose that, sadly.

7. If the team is dealing with new challenging work, you can form activities around dealing with it. For example: if we need to implement a rogue-like game mode, it may be inspirational to some members of the team to prepare a series of presentations about rogue-like games and stuff and share it. Cons: you can’t do that forever and need to switch to something else in the end, or activity will fade away.

Personally, I have a couple of successful cases where it worked well and even more – when it didn’t at all. Maybe someday I will share a showcase about it. 🔮