Working with a team of complete strangers to create a game is a challenge at the best of times, however this year (our first year at university), we faced a particular challenge due to the Coronavirus outbreak, which meant that we were unable to meet in person for the first few months of our project, and were left reliant on online forms of communication. In this post I will discuss some of the things that we have learned while working on Another Day during a global pandemic, and why we feel that they were important. 

The people are what make a game a success. 

As cheesy as it sounds, the individuals on our team and the external contributors that worked with us are what made our game a success. We were lucky to be surrounded by incredibly dedicated people, and from our very first meeting it was evident that we all had the same passion of creating games, and a shared vision of the kind of experience that we wanted to create. Everyone was hugely supportive of each other's ideas, work and personal circumstances, and it made working on the game a highly enjoyable experience. 

Keeping the team's spirits up during what was a challenging time for many of us was highly important, especially given the difficult themes that Another Day deals with. As a result, regular online games nights where the team could chat, bond and let of some steam without the pressures of working on the project became a common occurrence. In addition to daily scrum meetings over Discord, we also arranged longer "drop in" meetings on weekends where the team could be together while working on the game, helping to maintain a studio environment as best as we could. This helped to keep the team together and establish a bond between us all, despite not being able to meet in person at the start of the project; on most days we could often be found chatting in our Discord server long after the daily meeting was finished! 

Mental illness, stress and being overworked (burnout) are common and current issues in the games industry, and have recently generated a lot of discussion due to the raise in awareness of mental health. Having a friendly and supportive team may help to encourage team members who are struggling to reach out, as their team are likely to be understanding of their situation, allowing their team to assist them with work or seeking help if required. 

Staying agile is highly important to ensure good progress. 

Having an agile workflow was another element that was paramount to our success; daily scrum meetings, arranging our work into sprints, the use of an online Kanban board tool and regular updates to the team's Discord server helped to keep us all on track and aware of what our team mates were up to. When work is moved completely online it can feel very distant and it can become very easy to succumb to distractions or lose sight of the end goal of the project, and these regular updates and reminders helped to encourage the team and keep us focused on the task in hand. 

As mentioned above, burnout is common in the games industry. Often periods of "crunch" (working long hours in a rush to meet approaching deadlines) are attributed as being the cause of burnout. Crunch is common in projects with a waterfall style workflow, where things move in a linear direction, and often team members are left waiting for work to be completed before they can make a start on their own work. Staying agile helped the team to avoid crunch, which in turn helped us to avoid becoming overworked and experiencing burnout. 

Despite the negative aspects of working online, there were some positives; online communication meant that other members of the team were nearly always available to be contacted if necessary, and working from home allowed the team to work at times that best suited them and cut out the commute, allowing them to spend time working on the project that would otherwise be wasted on travel.

Adaptivity and positivity are key to overcoming issues. 

Changes to the UK's Coronavirus restrictions towards the beginning and the middle of the project meant that changes had to be made to the team's workflow within a short space of time, and we had to adapt from our original plans of working in person and move the project entirely online. Being able to quickly adapt to the regularly changing circumstances helped the team to stay on track and not waste the limited time that we had to complete the game. 

Maintaining a positive outlook when faced with issues helped the team to focus on solving the problem and boosted team spirit rather than becoming consumed with how difficult the task was, which could slow progress and lead to a loss in morale. 

To conclude, creating a game during the Coronavirus pandemic hasn't been without its challenges, however it has helped us to learn a lot about how we can improve the game development process and stay resilient when faced with problems that cause major changes to workflow and daily life. We hope to take what we have learned from our experiences and apply it to our future projects in order to improve our skills as developers and create better games going forward.