Our Secret Sauce: How We Develop Hit Games

A lot has changed since 2015. Bruno Mars song "Uptown Funk" is no longer number one on the Billboard Hot 100, the iPhone 6S is no longer the latest in the Apple suite and the world has gone through a pandemic. Personally, I moved from a city apartment to a place in the Stockholm archipelago and work-related, VR/AR technology has exponentially evolved, and we as a company have grown the same.

Companies today need to evolve quickly to keep up with the demands of players around the world. We are humble to the fact that we will likely change but what has not changed is the passion we have for visual computing at Resolution Games. Nothing is perfect but we have found that a lot of our success comes down to a strategy circling around how to best create value and a team with an innate drive to not just create great games but also great ways of working.

How we do things

Anyone that has ever been involved in making games knows that they are by no means easy to make. It’s not just the game, it’s the technology, it’s people collaborating and it can easily get messy. 

We believe our key to success has been to keep our teams small, independent, flexible and guided by a common cause. 

Throughout the collective experience we have from all over the games industry, it’s our belief that small teams innovate, take bigger risks, and move faster as there are less cooks in the kitchen and less processes. 

We pride ourselves for our 'flat' structure. The belief that we don’t need fancy titles or a whole lot of processes or control creates something great. We firmly believe that great ideas can come from anyone. Whether it's solving a problem or bringing new ideas to a project, we have structured our teams so that everyone feels safe and empowered to express and share their thoughts.

The role of leadership is to put together the best teams, but then trust them to do what they do best. One way to think about our teams is that they are smaller indie developers inside the larger company.

The role of the leadership is also to help the team to embrace chaos. If you want to innovate and truly create new experiences, you need to embrace some chaos. It will never be perfect, but it can be improved in iterations. As tempting as it may be, do not throw everything away and start with a blank sheet of paper. Keep at it and keep making small improvements to what you see. To truly be innovative we need to be humble, open-minded and take bold risks with unknown outcomes. 

How we get so much done

Resolution Games is divided into a variety of teams with different focuses. For each game, there is a dedicated team (or in some cases, more than one) that works on ongoing development. But we also have teams dedicated to exploring new ideas or perfecting approaches. Last year, for example, we announced a dedicated AR division that focuses on developing software experiences for the next generation of mobile AR and mixed reality headsets. We also have a team dedicated to developing "Tinyverse" experiences, the popular social hubs within games like Demeo and Blaston that allow players to connect for play and other activities outside of the actual game experience. We have teams that take care of our in-house tools, and teams that provide additional help when projects need it. In short, we build on the idea that teams help teams. 

This structure works well for us, but its success depends entirely on a strong company-wide spirit that enables free and open communication. We use common workplace tools to stay in touch, but we also rely as much as possible on in-person culture, especially during the more exploratory and creative stages of the process. It may be surprising coming from a company like ours, but what we have found is that at the moment there's little substitute for face-to-face brainstorming and conversation with your team.

You now have a little peek into how we structure our teams and operate. If there’s anything you want to learn more about let us know on Twitter.