Part 2 : Culture

This is part 2 of the Weyrdworks 2022 mid-year review where we focus on culture. If you haven’t checked out part 1, I recommend starting there for some context leading up to this post. You can find the first post on this topic here. Nurturing the right culture in a game development company is important to making great games. Let’s look at some feedback from the team:

1. Daily Syncs

Essentially a stand-up meeting where each person gets 1-2 minutes to highlight what’s been done yesterday and what’s on the agenda for the rest of the day. The daily sync received unanimous support this time around. While we’ve heard accounts of dread outside of Weyrdworks about regular sync-ups, the team feels this was crucial to getting the team coordinated on group efforts.

This daily routine, which lasts around 10-15 minutes every weekday morning, helps highlight issues anyone may be facing the day before. It allows everyone in the team to participate in problem-solving across disciplines. It also allows senior members to chime in with some guidance, mentorship and share best practices.

The key thing to keeping a daily sync useful is to have a moderator. Syncs should not last more than 2 minutes or dive too deep into technical matters to respect everyone’s time. Anything that needs further attention should be scheduled for a later ad hoc meeting.

2. Monday Personal Sync

Unfortunately, there was an adverse side-effect to daily syncs. Coupled with the mandate of WFH and flexibility of work hours, our more prolific members felt the pressure of working on weekends.

Borrowing from leadership speaker, Simon Sinek’s Monday Huddle, we’ve established a routine on Monday where the first morning interaction between colleagues would be about their personal lives. Every member of the team gets 2 minutes to highlight their weekend and are not allowed to update the team about any work done. This has led to less peer pressure to work on the weekends and improved mental health.

3. Lunch Honours

One of the most annoying things about working in Malaysia is that the people are never on time to any meetings. Malaysians, for some ungodly reason, are always late. We take timely attendance very seriously at Weyrdworks. This practice does not extend enough to the rest of the team.

Since January, we’ve enforced a light punishment dubbed “Lunch Honours“ for anyone who is late to, or misses a meeting without good reason. Anyone ‘awarded‘ a Lunch Honour owes the entire team RM15.00. While it was not measured, some improvements against the tardiness of the team were definitely felt during this period.

We still managed to accumulate over RM200.00 in Lunch Honours over a period of 6 months. This was later used to redeem a delicious fried chicken party at the nearest Texas Chicken for the entire team where JT and I were treated to lunch for once. I’ll take that win.

4. Sharing Sessions

Most people are shy to talk about themselves. At Weyrdworks, we encourage our team to shine a little spotlight on their interests or work. A Sharing Session is a 15 minute to an hour-long presentation about any topic of interest.

Here are some topics to give you an idea of what we talk about:

Learning Machine Learning in Unity - By Wee Jun Hun
How to be a VTuber 2D Edition - By Farra Najihah
Creating Your Own Vtuber 3DEdition - By Ainul Dania
Art 101 : Form, Colour, Compositions - By JT Yean
Optimising Game Animations - By Tan Jia Hui
WW Webserver Framework - By Shawn Beck

Since 2020, we’ve held over 30 Sharing Sessions with astounding variety. The schedule of sessions were almost seasonal with a line up of content that ran for about 3 months at a time. The sessions are now completely voluntary, but we do still nudge our team to set something up lest we become complacent in our own personal growth.

5. Game Night

This was more of a suggestion than about what’s already in place. From time to time, the gang would crowd around the office PlayStation and play a long game of Ultimate Chicken Horse. The issue is that this isn’t routine and is ALWAYS and ONLY initiated by me. One suggestion was to set a mandatory pause to work at the end of a set day to get everyone playing.

There’s definitely value in having more interaction between staff members beyond the context of work. Playing games together helps create trust, breakdown communication barriers, and develop stronger relationships with one another. Team-building activities don’t have to be a major event at a company retreat.

On Culture Feedback Next

Company culture is something I am highly invested in. In this post, we talked about best practices that we’ve put in place that has had some positive impact towards team morale. Next, we’ll look into actual feedback on the good, the bad and the ugly side of Weyrdworks. If you liked what you’ve read and are interested in how a small boutique indie game studio in Malaysia ticks, do consider signing up for our newsletter below to get notified on future updates.

WW Mid-Year Review 2022 (2/4)