One month into my own game company

It’s now been about a month since I’ve hired people for my own game company and have been working on it truly full-time.

A few things I’ve discovered:

1. My initial time estimates were way off – not for myself so much as for others. I look back now at tasks I scheduled for 1 hour, and took a contractor 3 days. My time estimates were based on my own ability and knowledge, rather than that of those of the people I hired. This is not their fault though – there is always a loss of productivity with more junior programmers, as well as them not being able to read my mind as to what I want, and the master plan of the whole architecture.

2. I can’t really assign tasks according to their usefulness because of interdependencies. So some of what I assign, while not being busywork, is far less of a priority than other things that need to be done but can’t be done independently.

3. I didn’t account for dead-time, which is time lost because I spent a day setting up the server, or figuring out how to edit .mel scripts, or trying to figure out which physics engine to use and what tools I need to do so.

4. People tend to work better after they get used to your company and management style. It’s usually necessary to reinforce several times certain things, such as work hours, or no Hungarian notation, etc. After the initial period there’s no more problems.

5. You never really know how good someone is until you work with them because ‘good’ isn’t just a matter of being experienced. It’s also a matter of attitude, work ethic, attention to detail, and willingness to learn. Given the choice, I’d rather hire someone inexperienced but who will go out of their way to try to do a good job than someone experienced but who only does the bare minimum.

6. You really need to work with someone throughout the day to get the top quality results. Simply assigning a task and coming back 3 days later when it is checked in is a guaranteed way to just waste 3 days of paying someone and getting yourself annoyed. On the other end, talking to someone as they do something will not only give you both good ideas but builds up loyalty and ensures no time is wasted and problems are resolved quickly.

7. As a technical director, you really have to know pretty much how to do everything, even if you hire a specialist to do it for you. Otherwise there is no way to tell if something is done correctly or not.

8. Every day spent is more money spent. That causes a lot of stress.

9. It’s nice to think that if I do a great job on the game it will make a lot of money. I have no way to know if that is actually true, and if I’m just wasting a lot of time and money.

10. It’s very important to preemptively avoid distractions. Don’t buy / download games, keep your webbrowser closed, etc, or you won’t get any work done working from home.