So, GDC’s been over for a couple of days now (almost a week actually) and I’ve yet to do a write up of my experiences. There really is no excuse, save for some life complications that are taking up some time (more on that very soon). Thankfully, I’ve gotten some time today to write a bit about GDC as well as (hopefully) put up a short post on agency (surprise, surprise) later in the day.

GDC was awesome as usual, although for some reason I felt very busy all week, even though I don’t remember going to many sessions. I did meet some cool people, and caught up with a few people I haven’t seen in a while, but of course that’s what GDC is for.

Probably the best actual talks (since Nuances of Game Design wasn’t really a talk) I attended all week were the ones on agile development. The guys from High Moon / Games From Within are very cool, and hearing about the way they do agile was freaking awesome. Getting to hear all about some of the metrics and processes that are used to create an agile team (including small Scrums, scrum of scrum meetings, keeping track of burndown, and ways to do long tem planning) definitely helped me understand just how cool agile actually can be.

The other thing these talks made me realize that most current team structures in the game industry are pretty broken: structures where you have your team of artists, team of programmers, and team of designers. Just by design, that structure puts up a communication barrier for each of your teams, and can automatically generate this “us versus them” mentality which isn’t going to work when you’re try to get 30 (or, more realistically, 60, or even 120) people collaborating on a game. So far as I can tell very few studios (save Bioware, High Moon, Valve, and Bungee) use the small, self organized, cross disciplinary team structure that the High Moon guys talked about, but it makes complete sense. 90% of feature requests in a game are going to require communication between disciplines, so that group of people should be sitting together, and be in meetings together every day, instead of being in meetings with people that are working on completely unrelated feature sets. It makes me wonder why this isn’t more prevalent. However, from the looks of the audience size at the tutorials and roundtables at GDC, I think this structure will be catching on very soon.

Plus, agile’s a buzz word now. And if there’s one thing the game industry can’t resist, it’s buzz words ;).