Weekly Dev Jam

Once a week, everyone at Tortuga Games gets together with one thing in mind: to get as much work done as possible. We find that working together in the same space is really motivating- you're simply less inclined to get distracted when the guy next to you is working hard.

Donald, hard at work.

We run the weekly jams alongside our regular meetings. By separating the work from the management/design side of things, we're able to concentrate on issues like integrating our work and establishing conventions etc outside of the meetings. This frees up the meetings for important, straightforward issues and makes everything run smoother.

Sneak peek of what we'd achieved about halfway through today's jam.

Having the programmers and artists work side-by-side really helps with team building, too. Plus, things run so much smoother when it's time to import new models/textures if the artists and programmers both work on it at once.

Working in jams really establishes a sense of ownership among the team. The artists get to see their work in action, the designers see the bigger picture coming together, and the programmers get to work with something prettier than the grey cubes they've been using as stand-in models.

Feels good when it all starts to come together.

In short, dev jams are great! They work really well for us as a team and we'll keep doing them until the game is done!