Joining A Game Design Team

{This is the third post in a series. If you’re interested in reading the second part, go to Understand Games Before Joining A Game Design Team.}

After you’ve worked alone for a while, created a few games on your own that you can show around to some friends and family. Later you moved on to work with a few friends here and there creating more games, maybe even having your own solo projects which you worked in your off hours. So now is the time you think you’re good enough at your job to form a real game design team (one that possibly will start a company together) and begin creating some games together.

To begin a team, you need to find good people to work with. There are many options to where you look for people to form a team with you. Family, friends, classmates, people in the intert, or just that weird guy you know he likes games but you never got to meet him well enough. Besides just looking at the people, you also need to look at the characteristics of those people to see if they are someone which you would like to team up with.

These characteristics can be various things and they’re all things which need to be taken into account. Some of them are: interesting in game design, their job in the game creation process, attitude, personality, etc.

How interested in game design is this person in game design? Is this something that he wants to make a career out of or is this just a fun hobby for the weekends? You need to avaluate this carefully because if you have different levels of interest and different goals in game design, at some point this will become evident and cause conflict. It might happen that you’re serious about game design and the other person isn’t and everytime you want to create games, you go all for it and the other person just messes around with it or does other things. Maybe the inverse is true. It might happen that you don’t want this to be a life goal, a career, and you just want to create some games here and there with a small team to have some fun and maybe get a little money while at it. Different people will obviously have different levels of interest but as a general rule, try to team up with people that have just about the same interesting level as you.

With public exposure, the attitude that your teammates have will a lot of times affect your image. If you’re teaming with a person who is known for being an arrogant jerk who puts every newbie down, your image will be of the person who works with the arrogant jerk or even the person who is in the arrogant jerk’s team. If you’re fine with that, no problem. It’s only a matter of taking into consideration that the image that the people on your team have, might affect yours.

Another thing to take consideration is the person’s personality. If you tend to be a project leader with strong opinions and a lot of times take the “my way or the highway” route when making decisions, try to avoid as best as you can having another person in your team who wants to take the decision making position. The reason behind that is because you’re just going to end up having really bad fights instead of creating games. Obviously, the same is true with any type of personality and you should try to choose, if possible, a pretty well diverse group of people because it will probably gel together better. With a more diverse team, everyone brings different qualities and traits to the table.

The job which this person does in the game design process can also affect if he joins you or not. This probably isn’t the most important factor of all, just because there are more important things to consider and game designing requires so many tasks to be completed that having an extra hand to help your team probably won’t hurt.

These are just some of the things in which you should take into consideration and should be taken as guidelines, not rules. You can try to learn as much as possible from previous experiences with teams to better help yourself understand which type of people are the best for you to work with and take advantage of the knowledge gained through those experiences.

Know any tips for when considering to join a team? Please comment about it below!