How HakJak Controlled the Chaos of Remote Brainstorming
As a preface: HakJak Studios was a fully remote studio with developers scattered around the United States. The entirety of our studio was run out of our robust Discord server.
Running an all-remote game studio presents a litany of challenges alongside its myriad advantages and, let me tell you, the biggest challenge of all was in corralling the ideation process in a way that encouraged creativity without yielding to the chaos.
No one wanted to be excluded from these conversations, since we were still in the high-level ideation stage, but it made for long, arduous meetings where we made relatively little progress towards our end goal: identifying viable features that we could showcase in our vertical slice (without crunching to get there).
At first, we tried unstructured meetings that would sometimes last hours, but after a couple of those — where I didn’t want to impose my own sensibilities on a team of deeply creative humans — we needed to make some changes.
Discord doesn’t have the ability to have speakers “raise a hand” (a Zoom and Google Hangouts feature), so we implemented an emoji that devs could drop into the channel’s chat to flag that they wanted to speak. This ensured that folks that weren’t able to get a word in with the unstructured chaos would be able to be heard in voice chat. That kind of worked, in that folks spoke more, but it didn’t help us get any closer to compromise and consensus for our design conversations.
We needed to take it a step further.
I’d been pulling together our documentation, including our updated living Game Design Document, in a Notion wiki that would need to be verified on a regular basis. If Notion could keep our game development docs corralled, I was hopeful that we could use it for brainstorming.
I was right.
So, I set up our next brainstorming session that would be timeboxed to an hour, captured in Notion with very specific questions that needed to explored, timing 15-minute Pomodoro sprints for each question, and then allowing each “idea” to be attributed to the developer that dreamed it up. It was, in fact, our best brainstorming session so far.
Here’s why it worked:
- Timeboxing our sessions to one hour allowed for everyone to be productive with a definitive end in sight. Endless meetings are a drain on brain power and mental health.
- Predefining the questions/topics we wanted to explore for that brainstorming session gave us the ability to get (and stay) laser-focused on the task in front of us without veering too hard into tangent territory.
- 15-minute sprints, with a few minutes in between for folks who needed to reorient themselves, provided structure without it being oppressive.
- Finally, everyone owned their ideas out loud and in perpetuity. There would be no question as to who suggested what and when, which meant that everyone could be confident in their contributions.
Keeping that documentation in Notion meant that we could not only link to our brainstorming sessions with ease, but we could search the pages for specific themes and write up summaries of what we talked about and what, if anything, we decided to pursue going forward.
Keeping immaculate documentation doesn’t just apply to process and code.
Making your game design process indexable and searchable ensures that the studio always knows where they were and how they got to where they eventually got to.
