Problem solving in a game development team - The Six Hats

The tactic that we want to show this time is the  system designed by Edward De Bono. It is the Six Hats.

Long story short, you can use this system in your team or with your friends or also with six players that just played you game. 

The hats are Six distinct directions. They are identified and assigned a color. 

The six directions are:

Managing
The Blue Hat – the guy that have the blue hat, have to do questions. what is the subject? what are we thinking about? what is the goal? Can look at the big picture.

Information
The White hat –the guy with the white hat considers purely what information is available, what are the facts?

Emotions 
The Red hat – the guy with this hat is intuitive or instinctive gut reactions or statements of emotional feeling (but not any justification).

Discernment 
The Black hat – the guy with this hat represent the logic applied to identifying reasons to be cautious and conservative. Practical, realistic.

Optimistic response
The Yellow hat – it's like the previous but with an important difference. It is the logic applied to identifying benefits, seeking harmony. Sees the brighter, sunny side of situations.

Creativity
The Green hat – is the statements of provocation and investigation, seeing where a thought goes. Thinks creatively, outside the box.

Use this system to find and solve problems in your game design or also to find new ideas or to have feedbacks about the next features that you want to add in your game.

If you like this system and you want to know more, you can also read the book of Edward De Bono.

The first step is always to play the game as a team

It’s hard to play the game you’re building. 

The build is buggy and lacks most of the final art. Yet by constantly playing it the team ends up not only clearing away all of those bugs and nagging user experiences but also actually creating something that players will love. 

Playing the game to exhaustion is actually the secret of tuning and user experience at many successful studios. Simulators help finalize the set in-game values. Play tests push user experience. The first step is always to play the game as a team.

Compact team Vs Large Team

CatNigiri "compact" Team, the developers of Keen and Necrosphere

In a compact team, every member cares about the quality of the game as a whole and bugs are spotted instantly. 

In large teams developers and artists concentrate on one individual piece at a time, failing to sometimes see how their work integrates into the game as a whole.

For a couple reasons, ambitious team sizes actually slow down the development instead of speeding up the progress. Overall, look to stay lean and make sure that people who join accelerate the progress instead of slowing the team down.