Friday, August 13, 2010
One of the biggest struggles I see even to this day is design decisions not getting relayed to the proper people. As a project moves along and you begin cutting features to keep the game in scope, it's very easy for related sub-tasks to remain on someones schedule. Trying to keep track of this type of information is extremely difficult, but when someone does work well after it is no longer needed...no one is happy about it.
Email should be the most effective method but what if you don't think of every single person who needs to hear the information? Then if you start including more people in every email just to be sure...people will start to ignore your emails because the information isn't applicable to them.
I would love to have a group of people who are responsible for communicating all information to the people under them. This is trickier than it sounds because these people have to have intimate knowledge of all workings and know exactly who needs to hear what at all times. In the mean time, I'm leading toward information over load to others just to be sure it at least gets out to those who need it.
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I reckon the answer may come in things like Google Wave. If you have a dedicated wave for level designers, senior project management, etc, then you don't have to remember who needs to know what every time you have something to say.
Of course that doesn't work for things that may span departments, but perhaps a combination of the two?