What is the optimal "team layout" for project management?

[Adriaan]

Hello,

As far as i know the recommended count for software development is the optimal to develop, but now that i'm using project management, is it better to have a big developper team doing multiple jobs? (games/genres) or is it better to seperate them out.

and for instance, should my company just have 1 design team instead of multiple desingers in every development team? (they are sleeping when alpha starts)

And what is the function of the secondary dev team, is this the betá team (bug fixing?) or is it doing work next to the main dev team in alpha?

Somebody that could explain this?

[Kaoz]

I don't understand "Team Layout" at all, the most common answer I've seen around is "whatever suit you the best" I'm starting to believe that no one knows. The way I see it is the game is designed to have a team with a lead with your designers, programmers and marketers and the building give you the option to separate them all of the above into their own working spaces.

Either the whole design is flaw and people just getting the best out of it or we just don't know how to use it, but either way the dev should explain how this thing works, in my experience so far since I've been playing the game is, for example making a programmers only room that will consist of devteam1 and devteam2(teams with lead Program, design, art, and marketing, two programmers per team will results in effectiveness drop due to too many teams in room) but you can still use your lead to micromanage the team, that if he had taken the HR course and the other course the is available for the lead team. The other option is that you can make teams of only programmers or and rooms of only programmers, but the use of the lead becomes absolute(which makes no sense, if this was to be the best way of making your teams, why include a lead)

[cfranks007]

I confess, I have no idea how it works.

[Adriaan]

well, seeing project managment has different "design" and dev/second dev options, i suppose we could have just 1 team of a couple desingers doing all the work instead of 2-6 desingers in every team sleeping when alpha starts. but indeed, its still very early in alpha to give a good guess, everyone is still struggling with the info we have.

[Trinexx]

Development/design teams do crappy work when they have too many tasks to work on at once. Additionally, going over the recommended amount of designers/programmers/artists for a project will also reduce the quality of their work, so it's better to have your dev team for projects built to the specific product they're making.

Marketing and support can handle multiple tasks without ♥♥♥♥♥♥♥ stuff up, and you aren't penalized for having more than a certain amount of workers, so you can safely split them into separate teams to work on multiple projects at once.

tl;dr: dev team with exact number of recommended designers/programmers/artists, separate marketing and support teams = outstanding quality on everything you make

[jolii]

"tl;dr: dev team with exact number of recommended designers/programmers/artists, separate marketing and support teams = outstanding quality on everything you make"

That feels right after hundreds of hours playing the game. A big problem is that leaving people idle for long periods of time, rather than trying to minimize their downtime isn't intuitive, especially for new players. Setting up a small art team, with a leader, to support a few projects shouldn't hurt quality the way it does. The secondary development team is almost inviting you to do things like this.

[Nevermind]

I agree with Jolii, but I will go into more detail from my experiences:
- Hire all employees manually. I typically sort by compatibility since low skills are easily trained.
- It's ok to use the HR budget/complain features but leave the number of artists/designers/programmers at zero so you can manually hire compatible people
- Pay attention to the age of people you hire. They seem to retire in their 60s so the younger the better
- Educate your employees if they're lacking proficiency in something. 2 months will remove most of the quality penalty, 3 months makes their work outstanding once their coding/art/design bar is full
- Only educate your team members in things your project actually needs. As an example, a 2D editor only requires 2D design/art/programming and Algorithm design/programming. Your developers will not benefit from a high System programming skill on a 2D editor project.
- Get a server running ASAP. SCM significantly reduces the number of bugs in the software
- Dedicated marketing and dedicated support teams seem to be able to scale with any number of employees, no matter how large.
- Having 3 shifts of marketing/support people takes up less office space (midnight-8am, 8am-4pm, 4pm-midnight)
- It's better to have more support/marketing people than you actually need. A bunch of missed tickets loses fans FAST
- Make ONE TEAM PER PRODUCT. Don't have one team alternate between products, have them focus on one thing and pump out sequels. The game gives fan bonuses for past products of that kind, so sequels will always be a sure thing
- Make your team exactly the number of recommended programmers/artists (and designers before you have a dedicated design team)
- Use forced roles in your teams
- It's ok for artists to sleep on the couch for months at a time
- Once you have multiple products going, move your designers to a dedicated design team - 8 designers MAX. Be sure to set all project managers to use this design team. Make sure all members of this team are proficient in ALL areas of design
- It's ok for your design team to sleep for months while your development teams crunch out the code
- Don't use secondary development teams in the Project Manager. It severely hurts the quality of the finished product
- Play with the development time slider in project management. Some of my teams require 110% development time to get outstanding and bug free, one team requires 120%.

[Stealth]

Originally posted by Nevermind:

- Make ONE TEAM PER PRODUCT. Don't have one team alternate between products, have them focus on one thing and pump out sequels. The game gives fan bonuses for past products of that kind, so sequels will always be a sure thing

Is there a fan penalty for making sequels too soon? Like If you make a new 2D editor every 6 months, will you lose fans or is that not a game mechanic?