Dev Diary #327 Designer smoke signals

[anna_svecova 375]

Ahoy Ylanders! 

Today, we are not going to discuss game development as it is. Instead, Štěpán, our designer will delve into a bit of bureaucracy and will talk to you about interdepartmental communication, which may seem straightforward but there are challenges and many layers of complexity. 

The departments that designers communicate with the most are programmers, artists, testers, production, and marketing. With programmers, the most important thing designers need to communicate is the implementation of a feature and its technical design, where the challenge is to make sure that the overall intention of the feature comes across clearly, just like the smallest of the details. When something doesn't go according to plan, us designers also have to be the mediators between programmers and testers, to a certain degree. When it comes to artists, this is where we (as might be obvious) talk all things visual. Not only do we need to convey the intended use of the feature so that the graphical elements correspond to it, but also we need to check that everything is easy to navigate and does not hinder the use of the feature. Since I already mentioned testers, let's talk about our cooperation as well. With testers, designers need to make sure that the intended functionality and behavior of the feature is as clear as possible and also we need to keep an open mind for feedback when something we thought was good turns out to be... eh... not so good. It's also important that we give them all the help accessing the feature in question and that we are available to help them out with any and all aspects of the feature. The boss of the chaos, aka the producer, is a key person for all parts of the development team when it comes to communication. They set up a timeline for feature development and implementation and perform regular checks to make sure everything is on time and if it isn't, they help us find ways to solve it. Producers also help handle any other non-standard issues that we haven't run into before so it's important to communicate those very clearly. And we also have to keep in touch with marketing on a regular basis. That's not only so they help us write our dev diaries (big grin), but also so that we can explain the feature to them as clearly as possible. This is important because they then have to communicate it to our players and in case of our community manager, she has to be able to assist our players if they run into any issues regarding this feature. 

Generally, the communication is well established since it's something we do similarly with every feature we work on so it runs well, but sometimes we can run into issues since Ylands is such a complex game with many features being worked on at the same time. 

Imagine it like this: you start a fire with the intention of sending a clear smoke signal to someone over the hill. Everything seems fine until, suddenly, there's a gust of wind. Not only that, but someone next to you starts their own fire and begins sending smoke signals to someone entirely different. To top it off, it starts raining, and you realize you're standing in the fire. What started as a clear message stating, "Performance has improved, and the previously mentioned issue is no longer present. Thanks," becomes, "Revolution is coming; prepare the oatmeal."

But in the end, we all love video games and we want to see the things we are working on bring joy to our players so we all work together to make sure everything gets resolved. 

I hope that this insight into the development has been interesting and has shown you another side of our work and since all the fires have been extinguished and smoke blown away (for me at least) this will be all for this week and I will go get some more inspiration in sunny Greece. 
Stay classy!