Category: Game Production
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The 2 Pizza Rule
Jeff Bezos apparently had a rule for meetings: if you couldn’t feed everyone in the room with two pizzas, the room was too big. Roughly six to eight people, depending on how hungry they are. The rule was designed to keep teams small, decisions fast, and accountability clear. It has been an idea that gets…
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Before Players Do
We had been working on the multiplayer match flow for months. The pieces were complex — menus, matchmaking, lobby states, loading sequences, onboarding moments — and getting them to work together technically was going to take significant time and even more effort from a lot of people. At some point we looked at what we…
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I Don’t Know Is A Complete Sentence
I’ve worked with a lot of interns over the years. Two of them illustrate something I’ve been thinking about better than any abstract argument could. The first came in the way most good interns do — uncertain, eager, and honest about both. When they didn’t know something they said so. When they got something wrong…
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The Centerist
The games industry tends to have two words for the kind of people on a development team. Specialist — someone with deep expertise in a specific discipline, hired to do that thing and largely only that thing. And generalist — a word that, if we’re being honest, most hiring managers read as “mostly useless.” You…
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No One Argues About The Reactor
In 1957, British author C. Northcote Parkinson described a fictional committee with three items on their agenda. First: signing a £10 million contract to build a nuclear reactor. Second: a proposal to build a £350 bicycle shed for the clerical staff. Third: £21 a year to supply refreshments for the committee itself. The fictional committee’s…