Olga Abashova on how the processes of creating games in G5 Entertainment are built

Alexander Semenov, App2Top Editor-in-Chief:Hi ! A little over a year ago, G5 had a new studio in Kaliningrad. You were involved in its launch, today you are heading it. And I just want to talk to you about the development processes in the team. But let’s start with the G5 story. Is it still a Russian or Swedish company?

Olga Abashova, Head of the Kaliningrad office of G5 Entertainment: Hi! We are a public Swedish company, the shares are placed on the Nasdaq Stockholm site, and the company’s headquarters are located in Stockholm. The company was founded in Moscow many years ago, and Vlad Suglobov and Alik Tabunov, the founders of the company, continue to lead it.

I know that the company has offices in Moscow, Stockholm and Kaliningrad. Where else?

We have a managing office in Malta. Marketing is in San Francisco. The largest development office is located in Kharkiv, the newest one is in Kaliningrad. In total, we have more than 300 employees in all offices.

We open offices in new cities when we realize that full-fledged project teams are being formed there. And this means that we are firmly established here.

Olya, you are the founder and head of the Kaliningrad office yourself. Tell me about him.

In Kaliningrad, we have 2 large project teams, each with more than 15 people. We are developing already released projects, each of which requires quite expensive content updates. Plus, of course, optimization is underway. That is, we are not only releasing new content, but also refining the quality of the old one, improving the technical part, adding new functionality, new game mechanics.

How does your office and, in general, G5 offices work?

At the heart of each development office are project teams. Management is distributed among all offices, in fact, we have partially remote management. The administrative part and functional departments are concentrated in one office.

We are constantly traveling, shuttling between offices, communicating closely with each other. There is no difficulty or problems in terms of communication, lack of information and so on.

In the central office (in Malta) we have a part of the top management and a licensing team. And here we gather for internal conferences and team building. Entire project teams gather for the conference period. First of all, of course, to sunbathe, chat, and, in between, discuss current issues and plans.

With so many offices and remote management, how is all this controlled? How do you avoid a mess?

Business processes and no magic. Actually, largely thanks to a well-established system of business processes, we quickly and “seamlessly” launched and configured the work of the development studio in Kaliningrad, ensuring its effective interaction with other offices. A very positive experience. And this is despite the fact that the Kaliningrad team initially had a different experience in terms of corporate culture, different standards (the main backbone is the employees of the closed Realore, – approx.editorial offices). I think not every company could endure such an infusion of new personnel so painlessly. Well, we also need to note the overall independence of our project teams.

This is the general answer. Open it, please.

Look, the development of any project somehow includes standard stages. There is some common part that can be formalized into business processes. We formalize and fix exactly this general part so that the development team can focus on creativity. You know, creativity should be where it is necessary and appropriate, but otherwise you just need order.

Can you give an example of such regulation for clarity? How does it actually work?

In terms of the same development, there are basic processes. For example, the development of a game from scratch to release. This whole process is divided into stages and steps with standard requirements and regulations at each stage, and the result of the process is a finished product – a game. Starting to make a new game with a new team, we do not puzzle over how to organize our work, but follow the proven standards of development organization for years.

And who is writing these steps, all this documentation? Is it coming down from above or is everything being done inside the project teams?

The process guru is our operations director and development director. They work through the first version of a new process when it becomes necessary. And in general, all processes are constantly being refactored and optimized both from below and from above. Of course, there are failures. It happens that something goes wrong. Then we analyze the problem that has arisen, adjust the process, adapt it to new tasks and situations.

If we talk directly about the development, then the project manager – “Executive Producer” is responsible for the vision of the project and the development of documentation on the design of the game. He can lead several projects. But the direct work with the team is done by the “Producer”, who is completely immersed in the project. When starting a new project, “Executive Producer” and “Producer” form a team, and the process begins.

Then development starts. But, I want to emphasize that already before the start, it is prescribed what who will do, at what stage, steps are described, specific interactions are described, a control system and a reporting system are painted. In the process of work, all this is monitored, there are checkpoints. In case of any changes in deadlines, schedules, budgets – everything is reflected in the documentation, everything is transparent. And it also works between offices. We rarely have big fakaps when something is lost somewhere or has not been done. But, of course, anything happens, we’re not machines. And then, following the process is not an end in itself. There are situations when it is necessary to make optimal decisions, and not as it is written.

That is, your main rule is to negotiate everything on the shore?

Well, not about everything, of course. Game development is not a very predictable thing, the fan factor is not formalized. But it is possible and necessary to synchronize the vision of the game according to the results of the stage, as well as to agree on the necessary changes. The main thing is to have a clear idea of what you are doing and why before starting work. Clear project goals and an action plan help a lot with this. And we also pay great attention to communication. So that it passes between the right people, so that the information reaches the whole group. Joint discussions, joint decision-making.

Mahjong Journey: Journey (one of the Kaliningrad G5 projects)

Now a step aside: and where is the place for creativity here, when everything is so painted and everything is so strictly regulated? Or creativity “on the ground” are you not very welcome?

And that’s not all. As I have already said, we regulate only standard processes that do not change or almost do not change from game to game. And we are doing this just to save time for creativity and experimentation, to enable teams to use their potential more effectively. So that project teams can quickly integrate the result of their creativity into the final product.

But does the introduction of proposals break the whole structure of work?

In front of. Here we are releasing an F2P project, and here the main work begins. The project is being scaled, acquiring a multi-million user audience. In this case, the right processes make it possible to streamline and speed up part of the work, in particular, the interaction of the project team with other departments. This means that the team can focus on finding new solutions, new functionality. This is how the right processes work – they help the team to realize their potential, not to waste time on inventing a bicycle. Each project has its own “roadmap”, which includes a full set of necessary features, but we, within the framework of project teams, jointly discuss and adopt solutions and features unique to the project, tied specifically to the genre and specifics of this game.

Now I want to clarify one point. What exactly does an “Executive Producer” do, besides writing a doc before development?

In our case, the “Executive Producer” is primarily responsible for developing a single direction of product development, accumulating and generalizing the opinions of the project team.

So he’s not the caretaker?

Not at all, the “Executive Producer” is partly a game designer, partly a manager who is fully responsible for all aspects of the project. He is responsible for both design and monetization, for the organization of work, for the budget of the project. “Executive Producer” assesses risks, looks at what competitors the product has, thinks how to catch up and overtake them, offers solutions to make the product better, and so on. He also evaluates the quality, how it was done, what level of quality was provided to him, looks at both the graphics and the gameplay itself, and so on at every stage (including after the project is released, when he begins to follow the updates of the game). In addition, he makes sure that the decisions that were made on the product are implemented as efficiently as possible.

And he has only a line producer directly subordinate to him? Who can he kick?

In general, we have polite employees, and kicking is not in our honor. But seriously, the “Executive Producer” does not interfere with the work of the leading specialists of the project, but tries to convey to them the vision of the project and makes sure that the project that we need is created. In general, he has the most communication with the line producer.

Well, what does linear do?

The line producer is engaged in direct management of the project team. It regulates the process at the level of tasks, their decomposition, load distribution, and resource management. The functions of our producer are close to the functions of the “Project Manager”.

Roughly speaking, does the “Executive Producer” say that he wants such and such a sun, and the linear producer sees what opportunities he has, calculates and distributes tasks so that this sun lights up?

The “Executive Producer” does not just say that he wants such and such a sun, he explains why it is like this, based on the vision of the project. And if the sun does not come out in some way, he will definitely tell about it and ask to redo it. The “Producer”, in turn, takes over the entire organizational part, makes sure that the sun correlates with the overall vision and project goals.

And already under the linear producer there is a chief programmer, an artist, and so on, who receive instructions from him and set tasks for their subordinates?

It’s not like that with us at all. The producer coordinates the work of the project team and helps project leaders (lead programmer, lead artist, lead project designer, lead project QA). Project leads are experts in their field who lead the relevant specialists within the project team, decisions are made based on their assessments. They participate in discussions of all the key points on the development of the game. We want the leads to be fully involved in the project, to understand how much the success of the project depends on them. That is why we are now developing a system of options for project teams: when an employee feels the importance of his contribution to the success of the project and the company and receives appropriate bonuses.

And to whom does the “Executive Producer” answer?

“Executive Producer” is responsible for achieving project goals to top management.

How is the work going directly with marketing? I know that you have an “external” one. That is, the project is done first and after that it is already bailed out to marketers.

Yes, marketing is starting to work closely with the game closer to release.

There are just two points of view on marketing. Some believe that a marketer should sit behind each project, who collects business metrics and offers to set, for example, conversion points in products, works closely with the team. Others believe that marketers should sit in a separate barrel, they are given an almost ready-made project and they decide for themselves what to do with it. In fact, they act as a group of experts who give a great feedback on a ready-made project. And you have, it turns out, the second model. And what is its advantage?

No, we have a different model. The main function of marketing is to ensure the most effective promotion of the game, allowing you to maximize its potential. But the production team of the project deals with business metrics. They know the competitors, they decide where to develop the project so that it is competitive and meets the targets.

I have witnessed both approaches. At my last place of work, I tried to implement grocery marketing. It’s long, expensive and very hard. The reason is that marketers often do not have a technical background and a game designer’s vision. Often, therefore, this approach is simply useless.

And if we summarize, then the business success of the project consists of excellent indicators of the game and successful marketing. It is very difficult to combine expertise on both issues in one person. Therefore, we have top management directly involved in the main issues of marketing and key design decisions, which is both “above” the development team and “above” the marketing team. This allows you to make more informed strategic decisions.

And in what way do you build a roadmap, what tools do you use?

We mainly use standard Jira types. Everyone is probably working with her now. The Gantt Chart shows the load distribution in the project perfectly. For all other aspects, we use Google tools. Of course, there is our own Wiki, in which we are engaged in describing all our turbulent activities.

I’ve heard two opinions about wiki. I know that, for example, the studios are inside Mail.Ru The Group maintains its knowledge base that they consider it an important tool because it allows new employees to quickly understand the project and remind old employees of something if they forgot about any aspect. But I also came across the opinion that this is a waste of time, because it takes a very long time to put everything in the Wiki, a lot of time is spent on this, which, for example, could be spent on code. What do you think about it?

We do not keep a project Wiki, all the necessary information is available from project leads, who convey it to all other team members. Wiki is a corporate knowledge base where we describe policies and processes adopted in the company. That is, processes related to the development of projects as a whole, and not to individual projects. So, specialists spend their time on the project, and not on filling out the wiki.

Maintaining a Wiki is really time-consuming, especially if you keep up-to-date the constantly changing knowledge base on the project (which we do not do). Although analogs are not much better either. For example, I have previously used Confluence. There’s a slightly different interface, slightly different functionality, but in general the same thing. Creating, filling and submitting articles both there and there is a very painstaking work.

It is for writing, for creating an article – there is a very convenient “tree” in the Wiki, it also has a very convenient search. In Confluence, it is more complicated, although formatting and making edits, on the contrary, are better constructed. Wiki markup stores a lot of surprises. Sometimes it takes angelic patience and humility to work with her.

On the other hand, from the user’s point of view, Wiki is really very good. It is very easy for any employee to find any information, because there is alphabetical order, keyword search, everything is convenient there, although there are nuances with formatting, but, in general, it is more effective than Confluence and, of course, better than not having it at all.

I see, thank you very much for the interview.