How to Stay Motivated During the Final Push to Release your Game

Thanks, Tired Creative Director. That’s a great question! This is all too common for so many teams.

At the beginning of working on a game there’s so many new things happening all the time it’s so exciting. One day there’s nothing and a few days later you’ve got a kinda functioning game. The game can go in any direction and anything can happen. So cool, right?!

Cut to late stage work and now nothing new can get put in for fear of breaking the build. The entire team can spend a week doing one tiny thing that players might not even notice that much! There’s also all those tidy up tasks that you’ve probably been procrastinating on for too long. On top of all that, you’re now oh so much closer to the general public getting their hands on your game. What if they don’t like it?!

Gah!!! No wonder you and your team are unmotivated. What can we do about that? Lots!!

I’ve got suggestions for individuals, for teams, for people who have spare time, for producers, and for people with buying power.

Suggestions for individuals

1. Remember that breaks are essential. If you’ve been super focused on finishing a game, you might have forgotten about the rest of your life. So go for a walk, get out into nature. Basically get away from your desk for some period of time. Time away will help you put work into a better perspective.
2. Alternatively: push through. This time will pass.
   • But, CAUTION, do not crunch for longer than a week or two at a time. Humans can’t sustain crunch for a long time. And the overall result will be that less work is done.
   • How do you know if you should push through or take a break? Pause for a moment and check in on yourself. Listen to your body. If you don’t feel like you can trust what you’re feeling anymore, ask someone else.
3. Figure out what’s ruining your motivation and getting you down right now. Is it just that the game isn’t finished yet? Is it the type of tasks you’re doing? Knowing what’s happening for you will help you figure out how to fix it.
4. Think about how you motivate yourself usually. Try to do that. Can you bribe yourself, create post-it words of encouragement, dance around the room to loud music, express yourself. Try to make it feel new for a short period by making a disproportiante deal out of something small. Acknowledge the slog. Do bursts of the slog and then bursts of fun tasks and things.
5. Ask for help from someone else on the team or an external person. It could be a friend who’s not even in the games industry. Ask this person to keep you accountable. Tell them that you’ll finish some task by a specific date. Then when that date comes you contact them and tell you how you did. Hopefully knowing that you’ll fail in someone else’s eyes will help you focus on that task you’ve been dreading and putting off.
   • If you can find a person who’s good at motivation, then they might be able to help you figure out why you can’t finish the task and help you get back on track. Here’s a hot tip for you: Producers are great at doing this since it’s kinda one of their basic job descriptions!

Suggestions for team activities

1. Have a meeting where you talk about final risks. What are you all worrying about? Sometimes just getting things out in the open and sharing can be helpful to move on. And if not, at least you’ll be able to work out which problems need to be tackled soonest.
2. Somewhat opposite to this is setting up a meeting where everyone shares all the things they like about the game. As a bonus or alternative, people can share things they enjoyed about the working on and making the game.
3. Similar to that, you can gather the team to just play the game while on a video call. That might mean watching one person or it could be everyone just playing on their own and talking about stuff that they see. Hopefully that gets people excited about how good the game is actually looking.
4. If you are all in-person: do a special lunch or afternoon tea. I find that food brightens most people’s day.
   • Anecdote time: At my first games job, when I started the team looked so down after over 6 years working the same game! So I started up Wednesday cake day where I’d bring in a home-made cake and have afternoon tea with the team.
5. If you are all remote: you can send around a recipe or a shopping list and then have a call where you all eat the same thing on a call together.

Some of these ideas can obviously be combined.

Suggestions for people with time

If you’re running out of things to do on the project, here are some things that might help everyone else stay motivated.

1. Pay it forward. Can you help out someone else on the team and take something off their plate?
2. Create a video of how the game used to look. This will hopefully impress people with how far you all have come.
3. Look through feedback from playtesters and gather only positive feedback to share with team
4. Gather the silly things people have shared on your shared communications (e.g. on Slack-Discord). This might also be ridiculous bug reports or jokes that only people working on this game would understand.
5. If you are an animator, make fake outtakes of the characters failing at their animations. Or gather together a master cut of all the animations for a character.
6. If you are an artist,
   • Create alternative versions of characters and scenes.
   • Ask if you can make up fake merch or branding things. You might be able to double-dip and use these items for the game’s social media content.
   • Create profile pics of team members in the style of the game.

Suggestions for producers

1. Look at near term goals and make a big deal when you finish them, even if they’re super small.
2. If you’re really at the end and finishing off levels, create over the top completion messages that are full of ! and 🎉 emoji. This could even be in a dedicated celebrations channel.
   • Think about how they do it in the film industry. They say “And that’s a wrap”… e.g. “That’s a wrap on Level 4!”, “That’s a wrap on VFX!”, and so on.
3. Post daily status of what’s remaining in the big scale or the small. So easy to see that you are getting things finished. Or you could focus on just completed tasks rather than to-do tasks. Check for scope creep.
4. Display a timeline of remaining builds and deliverables that easy for the team to see and understand how close you are to finishing.
   • You could focus on your burndown charts with time remaining getting smaller every day. Side note: I don’t love burndown charts since I think they give unrealistic expectations. But perhaps you’ve got a better system than me.

Suggestions for people with money

If you have buying power on the team:

1. Tell everyone to take a paid day or half day off. And optionally, ask everyone to share photos and stories of what they did.
2. Buy a gift for team members. If you have artists that have extra time on their hands, use them to create some custom merch that only team members get. Even a gift certificate would be a nice gesture to acknowledge all the hard work that’s been done and is getting done.
3. Plan a launch party or delegate someone to do that and give them a budget.

Conclusions

And wow… That’s all the ideas I’ve got for today.

Hopefully something there works for you and your team, Tired Creative Director. I love motivating people. Remember that motivation is not a one size fits all solution.

And if all else fails, just say it over and over again: this time will pass. Once the game is released you’ll forget about the horror of this and then convince yourself you want to make a new game, right?!

Remember: This is general advice and it might not be right for you and your team, even if you’re the one who wrote in the question! For me to help better, it needs to be a dialog between me, and you, and your entire team. You can hire me to consult for you —> jennsand.com