Thread by @direGoldfish

I strongly feel that we need to change how we staff our gamedev teams in this industry. I’m making a twitter thread about this in the hopes it reaches developers in the indie space and starts some conversations. [1/22]
#indiedev

IMO the best games are made when a smaller number of devs guides the core vision of the game. It is best to keep your team lean and agile when prototyping, then staff up during production. You then need to staff down again at the end of a dev cycle to close out and ship. [2/22]

For reference here is a graph covering the 28 month dev cycle for Kine. I took every developer's hours (including mine) each month and added it up. I had no money to hire ppl until this year, but if I had seed funding I suspect this would be a bit more of a bell curve. [3/22]

Historically ramping your team up and down meant either hiring ppl during development and firing people at the end of a project, or it meant every game had to be much bigger than the last and/or it meant a lot of developers sat around the studio bored between dev cycles. [4/22]

One solution for this is having extra helper studios: At 2K whenever a AAA project needed staff to close out development one of the idle studios would help the main dev team. (2k Australia devs were flown in to help ship Bioshock Infinite) [5/22]

Another solution is to become a multi-project studio with staff that can move from project to project depending on which game needs the most production support (Klei is an example of this) [6/22]

Small-scale indie devs do not do this. Those strategies require a lot of resources, which indies do not have. Instead indies typically bring ppl on as they need them with the understanding that after the game launches the team is dissolved. This is the "project-hire" model. [7/22

I would argue that this is dangerous. Indies are notoriously bad at scheduling. Ppl are signing onto a project for an unknown number of years. Project hires are relying on you for their livelihood, but don’t know when the game will ship. [8/22]

Project hires can be fired at any time (and often unexpectedly are) and are always on the lookout for the next gig since they aren’t sure how long the current one will last. Most people do not want to live this way. [9/10]

The solution I went with for Kine is a hybrid model. I kept the team as small as possible through the prototype phase (it was just me), and when I had the money to hire people I used that money to hire specialty houses rather than individuals. [10/22]

There is a growing market within the industry of specialty dev houses. These are teams that dive into a project and then leave when they are not needed. Disbelief in Boston has over 40 programmers that mostly specialize in engine programming and graphics. [11/22]

FXVille in Seattle is famously successful. You often need FX at the end of a project and you often need to complete them quickly. It is better for production to have 4 people doing all of your FX over 2 weeks then to have 1 person taking 2 months. [12/22]

For Kine I hired and worked with Surface Digital. I set up 4 artists with perforce and we overhauled all of the environment art and UI art over the course of 5 months. As I didn’t need them any more they rolled off onto other projects that Surface Digital was working on. [12/22]

Because I hired contract houses everyone I worked with had a full time job working for their respective company. The Americans had 401ks and health insurance. The people working on Kine have offices they can go to and coworkers they can have lunch with. [13/22]

Even though I didn’t employ them directly, everyone who worked on Kine had a steady salary (except for the few people contracting to their contract houses because they prefer working that way. That’s fine too!) [14/22]

This is more sustainable for our industry than hiring specific individuals for a project. If my project was canceled or things don’t work out then the people working with me would roll onto a different project that their contract house was working on. Everyone is safer. [15/22]

I very strongly believe indies should consider taking this approach to staffing up their teams. [16/22]

To be clear: I’m not saying that indie developers shouldn’t hire their friends, I’m saying if you are hiring your friend hourly or as a project hire then encourage them to start a small business as a contract house, or support them if they decide to do this. [17/22]

I’m also not saying indies need to have up-front money to pay contract houses, contract houses can work for a rev share just like people do. [18/22]

Also, to be clear, I don’t think a movement towards this system can start with the indie developers that do the hiring. There aren’t enough contract houses right now to serve this industry. [19/22]

Here is what I am saying: Are you a freelancer right now? Have you ever had to turn down work because you were busy? If this is a regular thing then you have an opportunity. Consider taking on more work than you can do and hiring a promising jr to help you get it done. [20/22]

Once you have more work than the two of you can do then hire more people of various seniority levels, and so on. If you are freelancing then you are already technically a small business. Consider building that business up a bit more and being an employer. [21/22]

I won't tell you how to live your life or what to do with your company, but I do believe that the industry very badly needs more people to consider doing this. I personally believe hiring contract houses should become the norm if we want a better more stable industry. [22/22]

I care strongly about this so here is more: I think this works as you grow your studio as well. I think when you hire someone you should assume they will help you prototype and shape the vision of the game in prepro, and they will be in charge of 2-3 contractors during production