I was a Montessori kid growing up so I have a pretty decent self-motivation to work on things, and to get things done--if not on an externally-applied completion target, than an internally-applied one. It's really fascinating to me how a lot of kids from the (US) public school system don't seem to be taught that sort of skill and unless there is a teacher or authority figure telling them the exact parameters and when a task is due by, they just sort of spiral. I think the only time I saw this sort of milestone-based self-determined project work was the Senior Research Project in my English class. It's a remnant of when people in public schools were being trained for the manufacturing industry where you would just sit at your work station and crank out widgets all day, but completely fails when a person is going to be relied on as an autonomous (or small team) actor in a larger creative project.
This ties in with my "work systems" work (my job now is teaching teams to work better through tools and toil reduction). Teaching teams to prioritize finishing over starting new work directly contributes to the idea that starting work and not completing work means you're getting backed up IN PROGRESS work, and increasing stress AND churn in your codebase. You can't know if you're stabilizing your work until you stop touching things (by completing them, completely). Great video, Mark.
On a related note, I always tell stakeholders including my dev team that "speed is quality". The faster things get done, the faster you can get them in front of feedback and the faster you can iterate on them. Sometimes I've gone as far as enforced deadlines as in "the work stops at the end of Monday, however much you end up polishing it", and I don't know how bad of an idea that is (and obviously it can only work with some disciplines), but it's one way outside of crunch and "demo" driven deadlines to create some completion urgency.
learning about completion urgency from ur channel altered how i viewed my projects in a positive way and i am incredibly thankful for that. thanks for sharing your wealth of knowledge on the internet with no strings attached. i honestly believe that the next generation of game developers will be all the better because of it
This should be shown in classrooms, this is great. I have seen the effect of demos both positively and negatively effect the progress of games I have worked on.
Absolutely fantastic video. I've never run into this concept of "completion urgency" before but now that it's been mentioned I can see how it has applied in past projects and every day life. The "running in place" metaphor really helps evoke the general idea of the concept. I really liked when you were talking about the hourglass method causing too much stress because I think this method is the one a lot of managers naturally come to when they've got a general feeling of what's wrong but don't have a concrete idea. Once you have the actual concept of completion urgency I think you can really address it more effectively and sustainably. Major kudos!
It's incredible what can be done by creative people in a short amount of time as we see with game jams. I want to take an incredibly ideal work week of twenty-eight hours and say, "What can a team working only twenty-eight hours a week bring to holistic completion in a month? Six months? A year?" --- to combine completion urgency as a part of keeping work hours small enough that people can stay healthy and creative.
You can see how a lack of urgency to complete affects everyday life. For an example everyone knows is not finishing your homework before the due date. Trying to rush it finished doesn't make the homework better. If you just did it before you wouldn't feel so stressed.
I do game dev as hobby, specifically as "modder" on warcraft 3, on a very big project. To get things done from my contributors is often the hardest part. Many lose ton of time in pointless things before delivering to me, and proper feedback is only possible after I try to use their contribution. I often find very hard to make them understand this principle.
@@Knight1029 thanks, yeah I am the author basically. But to motivate contributors is also a huge part of work. People who write codex, people who make models and textures... The project is going well, but is slow as hell to make AAA quality stuff at this scale.
@@InsaneMonsterW3RR I can imagine. I guess the closest analogue is trying to get everyone to contribute in a student project. I do hope you will be able to get motivated to deliver their work on time.
You can only have completion urgency when you have a reasonably articulate vision of an end point that can be understood by the team. If your project is roaming in the wilderness, building a sense of urgency will do little but stress the team.
It certainly helps but you can generate it when lost as long as you have people who can identify when you can set something down. Then, as features reach done, the whole thing crystalizes. Not a GREAT way to go, but it can work.
We used to use a project/client management tool called "done done". Not sure if it is still around!
ปีที่แล้ว +3
Completion urgency is probably the #1 thing I need in my life, not just re. game development, so I'm fully on-board with this. As a side-note: yes, the 2da 4eva shirt is extremely niche. But as someone who's spent a long time in the guts of various 2da files, it's my new favourite thing. The cut of the shirt being really flattering is a bonus!
What about fostering a company culture that teaches and emphasizes the importance of "completion urgency" and how each individual and role contributes to this? Start by testing when and where completion urgency is most needed and to what degree. You could also outline and train team members on specific processes designed to motivate individuals, allowing that motivation to spread to other team members, especially during critical times. This could create a domino effect, triggered and guided by a well-designed process that aims to cultivate and calibrate this sense of completion urgency across the team.
Useable/Playable demos have worked for me too, not just game stuff! Well presented. I am curious if your experience with this includes being on that executive team? I caught some of this between the lines in your presentation, but adding that having integrated demos has been key too. We learn so much from working through integrating our individual team's efforts with the myriad other things that are going on at any given phase of a project. Cheers, and thank you!
I don't think it is procrastination. Procrastination is the indefinite delay of STARTING things, out of anxiety, emotional disregulation, lack of motivation or fatigue. If you already did it fully enough as to be able to leave it at that and "maybe we improve later", you did not procrastinate. In fact, that is a good sign of completion focus (maybe not urgency, but you clearly is focused on the big picture instead of inutile details).
A problem that many methods of generating completion urgency share, schedules, demos, dailys, is that you're introducing a new, closer in time, goal. But if completing the game and reaching the new goal aren't exactly aligned, you risk having people working for the new goal, without getting closer to reaching the real one. Interenstinglt, something similar happens with AI, called AI misalignment.
I have to say that while I want great games, watching Gaider leave BioWare, start a new company and put out a decent game in short order kind of illustrates that one or two people on top compelled to make a game because they love games kind of gets it done.
I think this is very dependent on how you run the company. "Completion urgency" as you define it requires a common vision, investment in that vision and a sense of current progress. Maybe it works like that in Bioware. I think this would require a lot of proliferation of information from leadership to individual contributors on a very regular basis. And it stops working, once you go past 1 studio. Back when I worked at Ubisoft, completion was a very systematized thing. You had definitions of various stages of asset and code completion, as well as timelines within the project where you were expected to deliver it. This was basically a necessity, because on a fairly large project spread across 3-4 studios, you might have gone 3-4 years working, and never having a chance to talk to a game director, or a high-level producer.
@@MarkDarrah Kanban does not prioritize completion per say. It prioritizes bandwidth control. You can still have tasks dragging on forever. Scrum prioritized completion, but as you well know it is fairly hard to implement if you don't have well defined deliverables (which you often do not in creative enterprises like game dev). My point was mostly that as opposed to a semi-natural process you describe, you can solve the same problem in a very programmatic way, saying something like "L1 - this has to be playable on PC in debug package, L2 - it has to be feature-complete/level layout has to be done/whatever else, L3 - it has to run on consoles and have no major bugs, L4 - it has to run on consoles at 30 FPS and have no bugs except no-fix ones", and then you can say "You have 3 months to get it to L1, 6 months from there to get it to L2, another 3 months to L3 and another 3 months to L4". This has a downside of resigning to the fact that a large chunk of your team has no material investment in the game beyond their small piece though.
It turns out that at one time, Mark Darrah received from the top of EA the task of making DA2 in a year and a half against the backdrop of the Mass Effect 2 boom. And instead of protesting such an insane deadline, he came up with “an effective plan for development in a situation of particular urgency.” Because of what, the entire top core of developers fell apart, what put the franchise in a dying state, in which Starfield now finds itself?
Does completion urgency depend on individual personalities on the project? I'm just thinking how you'd create that sense in people who are more laid back as opposed to the Type A personalities.
Interestingly, the more laid back personalities often run with high completion urgency. Because they don't want to do a bunch of EXTRA work, they want to do it and move on. Which is great when you are shipping. Less great when you are prototyping.
Hello Mark. That was an very interesting video, but now I wonder: how do videogame developers are working exactly ? I am not a dev, but I work with them on a daily basis, and from what I understand of the Agile methodology, every feature/piece of development is prioritized and included in sprints that are lasting between 1 to 3 weeks. So from what I understand of you're telling in this video, it seems that video game studios don't really use similar methodology (at least in production or alpha) as it looks like people are free to work for as long as they want on the piece they are working on. Is this just a misunderstanding from my part, or is it that developing a video game is very different than developing another software and so the development methologies are different as well ?
Most studios do use agile. The trouble starts to arise when actual features are broken too finely. Agile partially assumes that devs are interchangible and that any one dev can take a feature from conception to completion. Neither of these is true in most cases in game dev
@@MarkDarrah Indeed it could. The debate over Starfield and Bethesda games generally has been interesting in deciding when a game is 'ready' vs. too buggy. Gaming audiences wanted Cyberpunk to ship, but that turned out poorly for a time. And I'm not a dev so of course there's a ton I don't know or understand about the technicalities.
@@MarkDarrah ...to rock? Hope everyone knows we love the devs, sad and disappointed on behalf of the brilliant people we've lost and also those who have to bust their butts more now without their old colleagues, and are angry at the execs only.
Completion urgency is definitely important. And crunch is the only thing that will rise a team to meet the challenge of shipping a game. Because most people are lazy, they are not used to the idea of working very very hard, they enter game studios like Bioware thinking their lives will be like the life of an "artist" of sorts. That they are "creative" and that means it's okay if they waste a lot of time. Crunch is where the rubber meets the road, and is the driving force to get things actually done. So I don't foresee, actually ever crunch going away.
@@MarkDarrah Thanks Mark, this was very informative. Completion urgency is not a very sexy side of game development to talk about, but in practical terms it's very important that you understand that this is a thing.
When the direction is not clear enough and the team is not in tune with each other, people will probably spend precious time doing things opposite of the actual goal. "Lazy" employees are like that for lack of motivation and guidance. If a certain team is working a lot and even then is very slower than they were supposed to be, then look at their leader. Creativity needs to adhere to previous requisites and goals stablished in pre-production. Otherwise, it's just chaos.
And when I say motivation, it includes a good salary for everyone. Well payed employees care more for their work and are often less stressed and anxious about their private life because they can consistently afford a higher quality of life. And quality of life in many cases means better transport to/from work, in many occasions living near the office and many other things that money can provide that buys time to relax. And people who is tired, anxious and dislikes their work may have difficulty to focus and both generally is a lot slower and creates less impressive things.
Will "Completion Urgency" be my legacy? Likely it will be "You May Celebrate Briefly"...
This concept could be applied to almost every project that involves lots of people, very very good to know it.
indeed
I was a Montessori kid growing up so I have a pretty decent self-motivation to work on things, and to get things done--if not on an externally-applied completion target, than an internally-applied one. It's really fascinating to me how a lot of kids from the (US) public school system don't seem to be taught that sort of skill and unless there is a teacher or authority figure telling them the exact parameters and when a task is due by, they just sort of spiral. I think the only time I saw this sort of milestone-based self-determined project work was the Senior Research Project in my English class. It's a remnant of when people in public schools were being trained for the manufacturing industry where you would just sit at your work station and crank out widgets all day, but completely fails when a person is going to be relied on as an autonomous (or small team) actor in a larger creative project.
Self direction is difficult for a lot of people
This ties in with my "work systems" work (my job now is teaching teams to work better through tools and toil reduction). Teaching teams to prioritize finishing over starting new work directly contributes to the idea that starting work and not completing work means you're getting backed up IN PROGRESS work, and increasing stress AND churn in your codebase.
You can't know if you're stabilizing your work until you stop touching things (by completing them, completely).
Great video, Mark.
Thank you!
On a related note, I always tell stakeholders including my dev team that "speed is quality". The faster things get done, the faster you can get them in front of feedback and the faster you can iterate on them. Sometimes I've gone as far as enforced deadlines as in "the work stops at the end of Monday, however much you end up polishing it", and I don't know how bad of an idea that is (and obviously it can only work with some disciplines), but it's one way outside of crunch and "demo" driven deadlines to create some completion urgency.
Yes. Time boxing can work but only if you enforce it.
learning about completion urgency from ur channel altered how i viewed my projects in a positive way and i am incredibly thankful for that. thanks for sharing your wealth of knowledge on the internet with no strings attached. i honestly believe that the next generation of game developers will be all the better because of it
I hope so
This should be shown in classrooms, this is great. I have seen the effect of demos both positively and negatively effect the progress of games I have worked on.
It cuts both ways
Absolutely fantastic video. I've never run into this concept of "completion urgency" before but now that it's been mentioned I can see how it has applied in past projects and every day life. The "running in place" metaphor really helps evoke the general idea of the concept.
I really liked when you were talking about the hourglass method causing too much stress because I think this method is the one a lot of managers naturally come to when they've got a general feeling of what's wrong but don't have a concrete idea. Once you have the actual concept of completion urgency I think you can really address it more effectively and sustainably.
Major kudos!
Thank you!
It's incredible what can be done by creative people in a short amount of time as we see with game jams.
I want to take an incredibly ideal work week of twenty-eight hours and say, "What can a team working only twenty-eight hours a week bring to holistic completion in a month? Six months? A year?" --- to combine completion urgency as a part of keeping work hours small enough that people can stay healthy and creative.
that would be the hope
You can see how a lack of urgency to complete affects everyday life. For an example everyone knows is not finishing your homework before the due date. Trying to rush it finished doesn't make the homework better. If you just did it before you wouldn't feel so stressed.
Yes.
I do game dev as hobby, specifically as "modder" on warcraft 3, on a very big project. To get things done from my contributors is often the hardest part. Many lose ton of time in pointless things before delivering to me, and proper feedback is only possible after I try to use their contribution. I often find very hard to make them understand this principle.
it is a challenge
You work on the Warcraft 3 Re-Reforged team. I love your guys work. I hope your project goes well.
@@Knight1029 thanks, yeah I am the author basically. But to motivate contributors is also a huge part of work. People who write codex, people who make models and textures... The project is going well, but is slow as hell to make AAA quality stuff at this scale.
@@InsaneMonsterW3RR I can imagine. I guess the closest analogue is trying to get everyone to contribute in a student project.
I do hope you will be able to get motivated to deliver their work on time.
You can only have completion urgency when you have a reasonably articulate vision of an end point that can be understood by the team. If your project is roaming in the wilderness, building a sense of urgency will do little but stress the team.
It certainly helps but you can generate it when lost as long as you have people who can identify when you can set something down. Then, as features reach done, the whole thing crystalizes.
Not a GREAT way to go, but it can work.
I actually use "done is done" in my daily life every since I first heard it from you. It's kinda life changing.
Yay!!!!!!
We used to use a project/client management tool called "done done". Not sure if it is still around!
Completion urgency is probably the #1 thing I need in my life, not just re. game development, so I'm fully on-board with this.
As a side-note: yes, the 2da 4eva shirt is extremely niche. But as someone who's spent a long time in the guts of various 2da files, it's my new favourite thing. The cut of the shirt being really flattering is a bonus!
Awesome!
What about fostering a company culture that teaches and emphasizes the importance of "completion urgency" and how each individual and role contributes to this? Start by testing when and where completion urgency is most needed and to what degree. You could also outline and train team members on specific processes designed to motivate individuals, allowing that motivation to spread to other team members, especially during critical times. This could create a domino effect, triggered and guided by a well-designed process that aims to cultivate and calibrate this sense of completion urgency across the team.
I do think "domino effect" if right. Once you got the culture going it might be self perpetuating
Useable/Playable demos have worked for me too, not just game stuff! Well presented. I am curious if your experience with this includes being on that executive team?
I caught some of this between the lines in your presentation, but adding that having integrated demos has been key too. We learn so much from working through integrating our individual team's efforts with the myriad other things that are going on at any given phase of a project. Cheers, and thank you!
yes demos can help if used correctly
Counterintuitively, it seems you can get completion urgency by procrastinating: "for now it's okay, if we have time, we can improve it later."
interesting, yes
I don't think it is procrastination. Procrastination is the indefinite delay of STARTING things, out of anxiety, emotional disregulation, lack of motivation or fatigue. If you already did it fully enough as to be able to leave it at that and "maybe we improve later", you did not procrastinate. In fact, that is a good sign of completion focus (maybe not urgency, but you clearly is focused on the big picture instead of inutile details).
A problem that many methods of generating completion urgency share, schedules, demos, dailys, is that you're introducing a new, closer in time, goal. But if completing the game and reaching the new goal aren't exactly aligned, you risk having people working for the new goal, without getting closer to reaching the real one. Interenstinglt, something similar happens with AI, called AI misalignment.
very true.
You can absolutely get phase urgency even when the phase isn't making the game more done
I have to say that while I want great games, watching Gaider leave BioWare, start a new company and put out a decent game in short order kind of illustrates that one or two people on top compelled to make a game because they love games kind of gets it done.
I haven’t tried Stray Gods yet
@@MarkDarrah it's so simple. Good characters, great voice actors, Gaider's writing, and comic book graphics. 30$.
I think this is very dependent on how you run the company. "Completion urgency" as you define it requires a common vision, investment in that vision and a sense of current progress. Maybe it works like that in Bioware. I think this would require a lot of proliferation of information from leadership to individual contributors on a very regular basis. And it stops working, once you go past 1 studio.
Back when I worked at Ubisoft, completion was a very systematized thing. You had definitions of various stages of asset and code completion, as well as timelines within the project where you were expected to deliver it. This was basically a necessity, because on a fairly large project spread across 3-4 studios, you might have gone 3-4 years working, and never having a chance to talk to a game director, or a high-level producer.
Processes like Kanban also prioritize completion. Or at least not allowing too much in progress
@@MarkDarrah Kanban does not prioritize completion per say. It prioritizes bandwidth control. You can still have tasks dragging on forever. Scrum prioritized completion, but as you well know it is fairly hard to implement if you don't have well defined deliverables (which you often do not in creative enterprises like game dev).
My point was mostly that as opposed to a semi-natural process you describe, you can solve the same problem in a very programmatic way, saying something like "L1 - this has to be playable on PC in debug package, L2 - it has to be feature-complete/level layout has to be done/whatever else, L3 - it has to run on consoles and have no major bugs, L4 - it has to run on consoles at 30 FPS and have no bugs except no-fix ones", and then you can say "You have 3 months to get it to L1, 6 months from there to get it to L2, another 3 months to L3 and another 3 months to L4".
This has a downside of resigning to the fact that a large chunk of your team has no material investment in the game beyond their small piece though.
It turns out that at one time, Mark Darrah received from the top of EA the task of making DA2 in a year and a half against the backdrop of the Mass Effect 2 boom. And instead of protesting such an insane deadline, he came up with “an effective plan for development in a situation of particular urgency.” Because of what, the entire top core of developers fell apart, what put the franchise in a dying state, in which Starfield now finds itself?
Interesting story
Great video! Any advice on how to engender completion urgency when not part of a team? For individual deliverables? Appreciate the awesome content!
For yourself? I think that's highly dependent upon you.
Many, many, game designers in my experience push back HARD on completion urgency. Which is very unfortunate.
Letting go can be very hard
Does completion urgency depend on individual personalities on the project? I'm just thinking how you'd create that sense in people who are more laid back as opposed to the Type A personalities.
Interestingly, the more laid back personalities often run with high completion urgency. Because they don't want to do a bunch of EXTRA work, they want to do it and move on. Which is great when you are shipping. Less great when you are prototyping.
Hello Mark. That was an very interesting video, but now I wonder: how do videogame developers are working exactly ?
I am not a dev, but I work with them on a daily basis, and from what I understand of the Agile methodology, every feature/piece of development is prioritized and included in sprints that are lasting between 1 to 3 weeks.
So from what I understand of you're telling in this video, it seems that video game studios don't really use similar methodology (at least in production or alpha) as it looks like people are free to work for as long as they want on the piece they are working on.
Is this just a misunderstanding from my part, or is it that developing a video game is very different than developing another software and so the development methologies are different as well ?
Most studios do use agile.
The trouble starts to arise when actual features are broken too finely.
Agile partially assumes that devs are interchangible and that any one dev can take a feature from conception to completion. Neither of these is true in most cases in game dev
@@MarkDarrah That makes sense. Thank you.
'DONE is the only done' could usefully apply to Dreadwolf. And yes I'm sure you can't talk about that...
Pretty sure he's not involved with that game.
He started consulting on it like 5 months ago. He made a video about it.@@banjomir519
@@banjomir519he is working as consultant
It could be applied to many things
@@MarkDarrah Indeed it could. The debate over Starfield and Bethesda games generally has been interesting in deciding when a game is 'ready' vs. too buggy. Gaming audiences wanted Cyberpunk to ship, but that turned out poorly for a time. And I'm not a dev so of course there's a ton I don't know or understand about the technicalities.
So just read the recent news at BW....do we fans have to be worried for the next Dragon Age? It's ok if you can't say clearly.
The game is still going..
@@MarkDarrah ...to rock?
Hope everyone knows we love the devs, sad and disappointed on behalf of the brilliant people we've lost and also those who have to bust their butts more now without their old colleagues, and are angry at the execs only.
Completion urgency is definitely important. And crunch is the only thing that will rise a team to meet the challenge of shipping a game. Because most people are lazy, they are not used to the idea of working very very hard, they enter game studios like Bioware thinking their lives will be like the life of an "artist" of sorts. That they are "creative" and that means it's okay if they waste a lot of time. Crunch is where the rubber meets the road, and is the driving force to get things actually done. So I don't foresee, actually ever crunch going away.
Using Crunch to generate completion urgency is like running your car to listen to the radio.
It DOES it, but its not a great way
@@MarkDarrah Thanks Mark, this was very informative. Completion urgency is not a very sexy side of game development to talk about, but in practical terms it's very important that you understand that this is a thing.
When the direction is not clear enough and the team is not in tune with each other, people will probably spend precious time doing things opposite of the actual goal. "Lazy" employees are like that for lack of motivation and guidance. If a certain team is working a lot and even then is very slower than they were supposed to be, then look at their leader. Creativity needs to adhere to previous requisites and goals stablished in pre-production. Otherwise, it's just chaos.
And when I say motivation, it includes a good salary for everyone. Well payed employees care more for their work and are often less stressed and anxious about their private life because they can consistently afford a higher quality of life. And quality of life in many cases means better transport to/from work, in many occasions living near the office and many other things that money can provide that buys time to relax. And people who is tired, anxious and dislikes their work may have difficulty to focus and both generally is a lot slower and creates less impressive things.