Even the best teams…
…need to follow the basics. This blog post will be a little different from the normal. For this post, I will be talking about our issues getting our art pipeline situated and putting team members in the best place for them to succeed. This situation has gone on for two months and there is A LOT of information to cover. The easy thing to do is spend the next few hours, typing up a storm, drowning the reader in words. I have been working on trying to craft a concise message when talking about these larger issues. I will not be talking about some of the minutia of this situation, but feel free to contact me if you have specific questions or would like more details about this situation.
The story so far
Our art pipeline has been inconsistent from the start. At the beginning of the project the art team assigned themselves specific aspects of the game they wanted to work on. So, we were covered when it came to things like 3D models, textures, lighting and environment. What our team was missing was a technical artist to do rigging and animation. This was something I brought up as a concern during pre-production but was reassured that it wouldn’t be an issue and those tasks would be broken up amongst the art team. That goal was reenforced when we made design decisions to reuse rigs for different enemy types, limit the number of total animations and created boss encounters that did not use animations at all. It was a solid plan, we just failed to execute.
We started running into issues when one of our artists, let’s call her Artist K, was not able to complete her work during a sprint. Starting in pre-production, Artist K was working on 3D models that I assumed would have been done by the end of the sprint. When that work was not completed, I was told by Artist D that type of work was difficult, and it was going to take more time than a single sprint. This behavior continued for the past 4 sprints. With each sprint Artist K not being able to complete the work she needed to do. Midway through Alpha, the other art team members started taking on Artist K’s tasks to help support her and keep the project on schedule. This resulted Artist D and T to feel stress and burnout until the point where Artist D and myself had a conversation with Artist K (more on that conversation below). Artist K’s work was still behind schedule at the end of Alpha, the same time I am writing this post.
Steps that I took
I want to use this section to explain some of the steps I took over the past few months to help Artist K with her work and to keep the project on schedule. I will be talking about the outcome and learnings from this situation in the next section.
As mentioned above, I knew that one of our bigger risks was that the team did not have a technical artist. I helped facilitate a meeting between art and design to hash out the technical work needing to be done. This meeting resulted with the agreement of two rigs (2 and 4 legged) that will be used for all enemies and bosses, enemies that would share animations such as walks, and using non-animated actors for boss fights as much as possible. This is where the ideas for the missiles and spikes came from in the tree boss fight.
When Artist K’s work started to fall behind, it was not something that I was overly concerned about. We had over a sprint of ‘buffer’ room according to the plan and I was assured that the work she was doing took longer than I expected. Of course, as this behavior continued, I started to get worried that something was not right about the situation. I had several conversations with Artist K where I asked if she had a blocker, if she felt comfortable with the work she was given, if she have too much work, and asked what amount of work could she do? Each time, she stated everything was fine and she just needed to do better.
We reached a point where we needed to start work on our animations. The initial plan, from pre-production, was to have Artist K do the rigging and weight painting then have Artist T do the animations. A perfect scenario would have looked something like this.
K - works on player weapon models
K - works on 2 leg melee rig and paint while T animates player weapon models
K - works on 4-legged bear rig and paint while T animates 2 let melee walk attack
K - works on 2 leg ranged paint and adjustment to rig as needed while T animates 4-legged bear walk and attack
Etc.
The idea being that K would feed work into T. The main goal being that each of those tasks would not take more than a day to do, over a week’s time, that would free up the artist to do other things and not get burnt out on technical tasks they were not keen on doing in the first place. The main issue being that Artist K hadn’t yet been able to complete the amount of work she would need to, to keep Artist T busy (bottleneck). I decided to spend a weekend learning how make a rig and controls. My hope was with me making the rig, Artist K would be able to more easily complete her work. With the rig and controllers completed, that allowed Artist T to work on animations then pass that work back to Artist K for the weight painting. Not a perfect solution, but it allowed us to continue working through Artist K’s lower throughput.
Finally, at the end of our 2nd sprint in Alpha, Artist D came to me with her frustrations about the amount of her work. Artist D also noticed the lower productivity with Artist K and took on some of her tasks to support her. As I mentioned above, this caused a lot of stress for Artist D. Now to be clear, neither myself nor Artist K asked Artist D to do that extra work, it was something that she wanted to do, to help out the team, that ended up hurting her more than helping the project. But it got to the point where we needed to have a conversation with Artist K. Artist D and I talked about how we wanted our conversation with Artist K to go, including tone and key things we needed to say. We had a solid foundation for what we wanted to talk about, but first we spoke with the Art teacher, Harry, to get his take on the situation.
Fortunately for us, the suggestions Harry made were the same things Artist D and I decided upon before talking to Harry. It was just a good affirmation that we were on the correct path. My biggest take-a-away from our conversation with Harry was that I needed to do a better job of holding people accountable to what they said they were going to do each sprint. Up until this point, if a task wasn’t completed in a sprint, it turned into a ‘we will get it next time’ mindset. Harry brought up a great point that I need to hold ALL team members accountable to their work. I took that mindset and used it when starting our last Alpha sprint (next blog post). In regard to Artist K, Harry suggested we let her fail. Let her learn from her mistakes and stop inadvertently covering up problems.
Artist D and I had the conversation with Artist K. In addition to that conversation, I had a separate 1-on-1 with Artist K to better understand her situation. Both times Artist K apologized for the stress she was causing the team. She stated that she was making some poor personal choices that were affecting her work and that she should be able to complete all of her work going forward. I felt like we were on the right path and based of Harry’s guidance, we needed to let Artist K fail if she couldn’t get her work done. Unfortunately, Artist K was not able to complete her three tasks for the last sprint of Alpha. The team did not hit all of its Alpha milestone deliverables.
Overview and key learnings
So that’s it? After all of that we are still missing deadlines? Not really. The team really responded well to me holding them accountable to their work during the sprint. I had several members come up to me and say they feel like it was good for the team to have that motivation and boot in the butt from time to time. When the team finished all of their deliverables except Artist K, she took that personally. In a group setting she owned her mistakes, apologized to the team and committed to getting herself back on track. With the way she spoke it was clear to me that she was taking the situation seriously. When presented to option to have more work taken off her plate, she refused. Stating that work was her responsibility, and she needs to be the one to do it. That ownership of her personal actions and tasks were not there in previous conversation with her when she said she would do better. As a team, we are reaching a fork in the road with our development (more on that on the next blog). How Artist K responds in the next few days will greatly impact where we go.
Here are some of the things I learned during this whole experience.
The initial problem was an inconsistent art pipeline with people doing tasks they were not able to do at the rate we needed it.
Team members did not feel comfortable enough to communicate that they were not able to complete certain tasks, even when asked.
I was not holding the team accountable to their work. Allowing things to slip through the cracks.
I did not allow team members to fail. This did not give those team members the opportunity to learn and grow from their mistakes.
Because I did not act sooner, the team missed their Alpha deliverables.
