Como você pode incentivar sua equipe de desenvolvimento de jogos a ser mais criativa?

The blocker we often see is that teams rarely discern between "game genre" and "story genre" - or even realise that these are two very different creative fields. If your goal is to build a sustainable studio, you need to understand both. But while most teams have vocabulary for gameplay, very few have it for story, characters and world building. This is why we see so many knockoff Tolkien fantasies, and paper-thin sci-fi world building. Whether you're making an arena shooter or a narrative game, you need to take the story, world and characters as seriously as you take tech and gameplay. You can't do that if you don't have the vocabulary. Creativity is not just about inventing - it's also about understanding.

Foster a culture of transparency and inclusivity where everyone feels empowered to: 1. Ask Questions: Encourage open dialogue where anyone, regardless of their role or expertise, can freely seek knowledge and share their curiosity. 2. Share Perspectives: Embrace diverse viewpoints by welcoming contributions from all, recognizing that varied experiences lead to more innovative solutions. 3. Cross-Domain Collaboration: Promote cross-pollination of ideas and skills, emphasizing that contributions from outside one's domain often bring fresh and valuable insights to the table.

Nurturing creativity is our North Star. We empower our team through freedom, diverse perspectives, and a culture that celebrates risk-taking. We explore beyond gaming, embrace failure as growth, and draw inspiration from every corner of life. Our safe haven for imaginative dreams thrives on collaboration, playful brainstorming, and a purpose-driven approach. We recognize and reward innovation, weaving it into our development goals. At the heart of it all, creativity isn't just a buzzword; it's our culture.

Contrary to the article, setting early goals can sometimes limit creativity. I've found success in sparking innovation by asking open-ended questions and nurturing small group dialogues. Crucially, we oscillate between creative exploration and focused productivity, which allows for a richer development process and harnesses the team's full creative potential.

You could brainstorm within a box. Define the box by saying what a game is and isn't, and defining rules. That said, breaking and twisting the rules is second nature to gamers and the source of a lot of fun. So I would recommend the opposite. Find the fun and change the rules and grow the box to accommodate.

It's always in everybody's best interest when feedback contains the truth whilst staying inside of respectfulness. One of the biggest pitfalls a team can make is that being positive all the time and neglecting negative things. Instead of this, good communication with constructive criticism always leads to a better path while acknowledging the good deeds along the way.

In a creative process feedback can be difficult. If you expect your team to explore the wide scope of a given problem, it may discourage them from trying out risky solutions, if they feel they might be negatively impacted from failing. So when giving feedback during this part of the process keep in mind that the goal is to explore, not to solve, not yet. Consider building feedback into your rituals. Where the team can safely give feedback to each other, and decide upon concrete actions to improve in future sprints. If a team is fully off the rails, you naturally have to reign them in, but be careful not to penalise failure, and be very clear that they are leaving the scope of the sprint.

I'd like to give one insight here: One important aspect that I encounter is over-feedback or endless-iteration. While feedback is highly important and iteration is good to a degree, especially on the artistic and subjective side of things where direction is needed, it can be a double edged sword if you start to pass the 80% rule and look for unrealistic perfection. In feedback cycles, being able to accept a certain threshold rather than a singular achievement point and being able to say "it's good now, we'll take a look later if need arises" is crucial if you ask me.

In game development, creativity is key. It’s important to create an environment that encourages innovation. This can be achieved by setting aside time for brainstorming, promoting a culture of openness where all ideas are valued, encouraging continuous learning and professional development, and recognizing and rewarding creativity. The best ideas can come from anywhere within the team.

Good ideas can come from anyone. Then once contributed people can riff on them to make them better. As a lead, you don't have to come up with all the ideas, just champion the good ones and put them into a cohesive vision.

A diverse team with varied backgrounds and experiences can bring fresh ideas to the table. Foster an inclusive environment that welcomes different perspectives.

One note I'd like to add here is that while yes, collaboration can be a key to certain successes, we should never forget to acknowledge individuals who work better alone or in very small teams. Certain individuals like this, can be incredibly valuable more often than not.

One of the most effective initiatives we've adopted at my company is 'Passion Weeks.' During this period, we grant the entire staff a week dedicated to creativity and innovation. We motivate our teams to collaborate with colleagues outside their usual departments, encouraging fresh perspectives and diverse teamwork. The week endup with a showcase where we share our insights, ideas, and outcomes. It's truly crazy the number of innovative features that have evolved from these sessions and made their way into our live products.

Allow the team to spend a small portion of their time, for example, 4 hours/week, to work on items that are in the experimental bucket and see how far they can get with it. Each person presents the project they worked on after an agreed duration to the entire team. This serves to inspire others and encourage learning.

For many people failure is stigmatised, and building a team with room to fail and be difficult, and it takes time to build comfort with failure. You might benefit from building a ritual around celebrating your failures, and learning from them. 1) allow each team member to anonymously add their failures to a list or Miro-board. 2) celebrate. Well done! 3) the team goes through each failure, and discuss what can be learned from them. (It might help to group related failures together). 4) From the teams learnings, make a plan on where to go next. This way you guide your creativity towards a goal, and naturally funnel in to more concrete solutions.

Constantly asking "why" questions in a gamedev team can help distill preconceived ideas to reframe how things are currently being done (and could be improved). Having a flexible and open mindset, can also allow the flow of disruptive innovation through impactful, out-of-the-box ideas.

Nurturing creativity in a gamedev team is definitely about creating a safe space to foster a curiosity-driven culture with healthy communication practices, where everyone is welcome to collaboratively try new and better ways of doing things.

Satoshi Tajiri and Shigeru Miyamoto cite their original inspirations as landscape, wildlife and folklore. Similarly, great film makers don’t learn their craft just by watching other movies, they draw from a thousand sources; Alfred Hitchcock was passionate about cinema, but also about art, music, and literature. Likewise the original creative artists at work in TV, novels, painting – they draw their ideas from other media than their own. So encourage the team to take a look at sources they might never have considered. Polish movies of the 1960s. Art installations. 19th century fiction. Ragtime. Geocaching. A trip to a random play. Anything that might spark a fresh outlook that they can then bring back to the game.

There is a lot of ways to encourage game development team to be creative: First of all, The Reward System. Small rewards, big rewards, it doesn't matter. It is very motivative. Secondly, (maybe) small amount of game partnership. For example: you can offer %1-%2 (higher or lesser) of game's net earnings who comes with a great ideas. If they find a very creative idea, game will be more succesful and reward will be bigger. If I would become a game team leader. for third options, I would play games with my team one day of week (3-5 hours around). While playing, we would talk about game strategy, design or "how did they do this" questions. With this activity, we would have fun, relaxed and with brainstorm, we will be creative.

Take the team on an offsite and do mushrooms and play with toys, simulating the game with lego pieces and toys. Run through all scenarios, take notes and pictures, make a plan on how to implement these systems. When sober, run through the notes and clean up anything that needs cleaning up.

You need good tools that allow designers to quickly prototype and experiment on ideas without pulling in engineers and artists just to prove out the viability of a gameplay asset or layout.