Mid Sem Break: Meetings and Working Bees

Meeting in person is very important for our team. We meet for an hour or two Mondays, then again on Wednesdays after class in order to compare progress, make sure everyone's on track, and often nut out some of the tougher design problems as a team. Then on the weekend, we come together for a whole day (usually from four to seven hours) for a working bee. That's a minimum of three meetings per week.

At working bees, everyone at in the team gets together with one thing in mind: to get as much work done as possible. We find that working together in the same space is really motivating- you're simply less inclined to get distracted when the guy next to you is working hard.

We run the working bees alongside (but seperate to) our regular meetings. By separating the work from the management/design side of things, we're able to concentrate on issues like integrating our work and establishing conventions etc outside of the design meetings. This frees up those meetings for important, straightforward issues and makes everything run smoother.

Having the programmers and artists work side-by-side really helps with team building, too. Plus, things run so much smoother when it's time to import new assets if the artists and programmers both work on it at once.

Working bees really establish a sense of ownership among the team. The artists get to see their work in action, the designers see the bigger picture coming together, and the programmers get to work with something prettier than the grey cubes they've been using as stand-in models.

Feels good when it all starts to come together.

In short, working bees are great! They work really well for us as a team and we'll keep doing them until the game is done!