How to Keep the Tech Skill Strong in Game Development

There are so many novelties and technology tweaks happening every day. Gaming companies seeking team extension require “the newest, latest, best and all”. How can a game development service provider stay in the groove?

For some time, on their own initiative they have been organizing training meetings in order to share their best practices and in-depth experience around the professional field, subsequently implementing them within related projects. Why do they take their personal time to do this? We spoke to the initiators among tech managers and lead programmers about the objectives and benefits of self-education in a game development team.

Seeds and Roots: What’s the Idea

We decided to address the challenge of self-education in an integrated manner in order to solve the problem of FAQ in our team. Above all, there is so much experience and information accumulated, so much code to review, that it seems urgent to keep them for newcomers in a separate storage for faster onboarding, knowledge sharing and reuse.

This ensures faster project staffing and team ramp-up which is often a requirement from our clients. Also, this helps manage the team’s common expertise making it transparent, well-documented and thus reusable, instead of building teams around several key nuclear tech leads with a certain skill. Our approach has already proven efficient.

At first, we planned to organize training meetings once a week, but right after the first one, we realized we needed them at least twice a week. There a couple dozen specific topics that we’d like to discuss with the team so that not only several guys working on a particular project gain the new skill, but the whole team.

“Stranger Danger”

Our trainings serve us not only as a source of valuable knowledge on the agenda, but also as a good opportunity to develop a public speaking ability and other soft skills, which are also important for us. It is necessary to be brief, clear and to the point while having negotiations with customers in order to be understood correctly and demonstrate that we highly appreciate their time.

The participants of the training meetings are exclusively members of the zGames team. Such a decision takes roots from the earlier experience of meetings within a mixed audience when it was at times difficult to keep the learning process exciting for both zGames guys, very competent and experienced, and external guests who often lagged behind. What really makes sense in terms of learning efficiency is the expertise level of participants. This is why we deliver these training exclusively to our team.

“From Each According to His Ability”

The agenda of our meetings is widely variable. Depending on the level of complexity within each topic, we assign both senior and junior programmers as reporters. According to the knowledge and skills level, each speaker is responsible for holding the training meeting on a particular topic — from scavenging to GOF creational patterns or project estimation.

Among the topics that we have already covered are Unit tests, GRASP patterns, zGames Common Library, Lightmapping, Unity native GUI, GOF structural and behavioral patterns, cryptography fundamentals, and others.

Education Evolution

Our short-term objectives, in terms of organization procedures, include stocking the materials from each training meeting, moderating new reports, making video archives and gathering quality feedback. All these materials are invaluable content and the basis for further classes.

What we love most about this initiative is the dedication and passion our guys show for the new stuff. True professionalism is based on endless curiosity.