Hey there. I'm on a largish scrum team of talented developers who all work on varied topics across the game. This tends to grow our story count and makes sprints a real challenge to track. These difficulties are compounded by the fact we are working remotely and rely more on tools that would assist our work. Though the remote work is a totally separate topic I'll likely post about…

Does anyone have experience working with a team where each person touches disparate topics in a game and your strategies in managing them? Any resources you would recommend like postmortems, retrospectives or talks from teams working in an agile environment on a GaaS?

@Hoosie All of the questions you asked about are accounted for. The scrum framework is being leveraged mostly as our game is live and we release the features/content we work up every few weeks. Waterfall is too rigid so we structure everything around the goals set at different cadences, based on what we want to deliver in shorter (sprint) and longer (season) time frames. If you're keen to learn about what project management looks like in games; search for producer GDC talks on YouTube. In general, project management is the wrong approach when managing highly creative teams. A lot of what I learned in the PM field does help at times, but is not something I heavily lean into when working with the people.

The big problem I have, and I would love to hear from @Tom Sloper , is the fact my team cannot find a subject to be united on. So I have about 11 devs I'm accounting for who are all scattered across niche topics that also support the rest of the team. This makes our sprints go from having 5 stories to 15 when compared to some other teams. We might estimate the same amount of story points, but they tend to be lots of 1s or 2s because it's one person focusing on the topic. Not sure if you've had this experience in the past and would love to hear your thoughts or experience on the subject.

@Tom Sloper Thanks for reply, Tom! Maybe I was being a bit vague to not identify who I am though I never said I was working on a hobby game. I'm over in Europe, working for a studio with 70+ developers all making normal salaries on a GaaS/Live service game with a robust burn rate. It's quite a feat to coordinate efforts remotely, but we make due. And happily since we can all still work.

That said: our team structure in the company is unique where we focus on broad subjects across the game. This disperses resources across different teams where I find it difficult to find a feature that all of my 11 team members could work together on. Which is why I mentioned we typically have a lot of stories we track each sprint (usually 1.2 per dev). It makes it even more challenging with working remote where we all can feel a bit siloed from each other. Was hoping to source or connect with other devs in the industry though it seems a bit quiet in the Production and Management section.

Either way. Happy to have a vet of the industry respond. ?

Wouldn't nearly everyone be blocked when 11 people work on the same giant story? Even if you could split it into even substories, there would probably be dependencies and people would need to wait on each other.

IMHO you should be happy about your current situation.

@wintertime Not sure I follow. We touch a lot of topics that we tend to feel a bit disconnected. A nice epic taking a feature from prototype to MVP would be a welcome change.

Never said I wasn't happy and I had actually very specifically stated that. Bu I feel if things are good, they can always be better. Don't settle.