Serenity Forge on Growing and Nurturing Great Talent

Introduction

My name is Parker Davis, and I'm the Development Director at Serenity Forge. I'm the creative and operational lead of our Unreal Engine development team, and I'm also responsible for most of the talent strategy and high-level HR management across the company, particularly in development.

My educational path was a bit strange: I studied English Lit at the University of Colorado for a couple of years, then worked in a recording studio before briefly attending NYU for Music Technology, then took a year off of school to live with my dad in the Caribbean and build a sailboat from scratch. When I came back, I knew I wanted to move into games, and I decided to start working instead of going back to school; university life was just not a good fit for me. I spent a couple of years at a music streaming company while doing freelance marketing and video production work on the side, which I parlayed into an opportunity at Serenity Forge for a Business and Publishing Associate.

At the time, Serenity Forge was 10-15 people, so our internal business and external publishing efforts were all handled by the two co-founders, Zhenghua Yang and Kevin Zhang, and myself. The role was a rocketship of learning about the business and industry of games. I remember one of my first big assignments was just a few weeks in when we decided we wanted to take a run at becoming the publisher for Doki Doki Literature Club and needed to create a publishing plan we could pitch to Team Salvato. For someone who had plenty of marketing experience but had just joined the industry, it was definitely learning to swim in the deep end.

My audio experience soon meant I needed to start giving time to our development division to handle all of the music and sound fx for Date Night Bowling, which turned into an Audio Director role on that team, which then expanded to include a Producer role as we scaled up for the recently-announced Homestead Arcana, our most ambitious project to date. Since that project began, we've grown the company to about 40 people split about evenly between the development and business/publishing sides of the company. As part of that growth, we decided to spin off a new development team to focus on new genres and styles of games developed in Unreal Engine (previously, all of our development was in Unity, and most of it still is). I now run that team of about ten people, about half of whom are artists and animators.

We're still a relatively small company, but a lot of how we've held together the past couple of years of growth has come from embracing a renewed push for organizational structure and process. Like a lot of small creative companies, we started off pretty flat because it's nimble and low-overhead. But around the time I joined, we had started eyeing some larger initiatives and projects, and we knew that any more scaling up would make it absolutely critical to establish more robust processes of creative production with clear decision rights and communication flow. That change management has been one of my primary responsibilities over the past couple of years – and it's something I've greatly enjoyed working on.

Serenity Forge

One of the things about Serenity Forge that’s pretty special is that we’re a company with a lot of variety for our size (~40 people). Our work spans the games-industry gamut from development in both Unity and Unreal to publishing and marketing services to business and admin support, all of which are utilized for both internal projects and external clients.

With such a diverse array of work and people, it’s been important as we grow to make sure that each division of the company (development, publishing, and business) has the tools and resources it needs to self-manage as much as possible. While we do have overarching leadership and shared resources, we work hard to ensure divisional directors (like me) and their teams are empowered with both the responsibilities and prerogatives to lead their teams to success. We have shared business goals, but directors are primary leaders of strategy and opportunities for their teams within those broader objectives; we have shared administrative and technical resources, but teams also have the budget and discretion to build their technology stacks in a way that fits their operational needs.

It’s a balance, to be sure, because teams should be independent but not isolated. We want to make sure that the teams could, theoretically, be severed from the company and still function, but that they are nonetheless connected seamlessly so that integrative collaboration across divisions can be as frictionless as possible.

One of the best ways to showcase this wide spectrum of possibility in the studio is to look at two of the announced projects we’re most proud of: 

• Doki Doki Literature Club Plus! has been an incredibly fulfilling project where our publishing team has been able to plug into one of the most surprisingly impactful indie games of the past few years. What started as a porting and publishing endeavor evolved over time into a more integrative co-development project alongside Team Salvato leveraging a wide range of technical, creative, and production resources in our publishing division.
• On the other side of the spectrum, our recently-announced Homestead Arcana is an original concept from the Serenity Forge team developed in-house and published by Skybound Games. Homestead Arcana has been a transformative journey for our development team – our largest project to date – led internally from concept to completion.

The wonderful thing about Serenity Forge is that, even though these projects are run in different divisions, we’ve still been able to leverage resources and knowledge from across the company to make sure that each of these wonderful projects gets what it needs.

The Necessary Skills

When we’re hiring in any of our divisions and their component teams across the company, we’re always looking for people who will not only do their work successfully but who will empower their teammates to do the same.

Each of our leaders has their own way of vetting this; for me, these are the primary questions I’m always going to ask of any new or prospective hire:

• Do they have the skills and vocabulary they need to get started in the role, learn the work, and integrate with their teammates?
• Do they show an ability and willingness to learn and experiment with passion, question their assumptions humbly, and tackle new challenges thoughtfully?
• Do they demonstrate a propensity for empathy, respect, and professionalism that will have a positive impact on the culture and experience of their team?

All of these are necessary, and none are sufficient on their own. For a team as nimble and integrative as ours, we certainly need to make sure that everyone has the skill and experience to contribute productively, but we also need to acknowledge that no amount of talent makes up for someone who isn’t ready to come to the table as a collaborator. Furthermore, we have (and want to keep) a pretty diverse team, so we’re never looking for just one kind of person in terms of personal or professional perspective.

In short, as long as someone is willing to work hard, collaborate respectfully, and communicate with kindness, they’ll fit right in at Serenity Forge.

Welcoming Newcomers

The first thing to acknowledge with any new hire – particularly in game development – is that no amount of skill or experience will negate the need for a healthy onboarding process. There’s always a learning period of some kind, whether that’s adjusting to the team’s tools, getting along with new people, or just getting in the habit of the way we work and interact together. So, for managers at Serenity Forge, the first step is to make sure we are investing in that time. You can’t just say “you’ll need some time to get up to speed” and then plan their work such that things will break if they don’t immediately start hitting deadlines on time. You need to proactively plan for a buffer where new hires can grow into their new role and ensure there are ample opportunities for teammates and managers to check in and offer hands-on assistance. And, as soon as possible, get them plugged into the part of the job that isn’t working: team-building.

There’s a bit of a cliche about the term team-building where it often comes across as guest seminars and retreats and trust exercises. I’m sure those things have been helpful for some people at some point, but for us, it’s a much simpler question: how do we give our people the chance to have enjoyable and refreshing experiences with each other? For my team, the starting point is that we’ll get together (in-office and remote people) once a sprint to have lunch and play a game or watch a show together. We do it on company time, and we take our time doing it.

For new hires and long-term employees, both, I think a lot of times companies can overcomplicate the question of building connections on your team and making people feel welcome. If you fill your team with the right people – ones who are capable and caring – then it’s often not that complicated to make sure they have the chance to get along.

Managing Burnout

Growing and nurturing a sustainable development team means avoiding burnout wherever possible, even if sacrifices need to be made. Our first, best defense against burnout is that we try not to overtighten our deadlines in the first place. A lot of teams try to squeeze margins by budgeting projects to exact fit, but this is creative work, and it’s a marathon. If you’re not leaving room for experimentation and mistakes and rest time, you haven’t actually planned the whole project.

But of course, no matter what you do, there will always be moments when people want or need to push a little harder than usual to achieve our shared goals, and again the key here is to make sure you have room. The solution to someone working a late night, for example, is pretty easy: they can take it easy the next day by sleeping in or leaving early. The only reason that doesn’t seem obvious on some teams is that they’ve planned things so tightly that they think they can’t sacrifice those hours. Or sometimes, and this can be harder to catch when it’s happening, teams rely so much on a design by committee and synchronous communication that someone being absent for a day or even a few hours will automatically roadblock other people.

The analogy I always like to use (that my team often makes fun of me for) is that I want to find people who are like Formula 1 cars. They’re capable of amazing things, they can astound and amaze you, but they need a lot of attention and investment. You have to care for an F1 car immeasurably more than your old hand-me-down Subaru, by design. I think a lot of leaders and teams want to get performance out of their people without realizing the fuel and maintenance required to sustain them healthily. By the way, it’s also not the worst idea in the world to have some variety on your team: if you have a few people in a cohort who like to sprint hard and then rest, maybe back them up with a few people who like working slower and more steadily. If you understand your team and know how to plan to their strengths and needs, all of those people can be wonderful, productive collaborators for each other.

Freedom as Part of the Working Environment

Everyone is responsible for more than just the task right in front of them; we ask everyone to contribute to our larger network of thinking and planning – not just about what we’re making, but also about how we’re making it. Especially within a particular component team (Art, Design, Tech, etc.), there's always robust, ongoing discussion about our creative and technical frameworks. When you have a wonderful team of thoughtful experts, it'd be a waste not to have them vetting your ideas and generating their own as freely and often as possible.

Now, that’s not to say that we all get in a room and brainstorm every decision together. In a creative business, making everything a democracy can be just as problematic of a shortcut as making everything a dictatorship. Ensuring everyone has the bandwidth to give full intellectual and emotional investment to their work without overwhelming them also means filtering out things that they don’t need to engage with. So a key part of our process is making sure that we find the most efficient and effective ways to get perspective from everyone on the team process.

For example, I as the director want to make sure that I can get frequent feedback from everyone on the team about the project, even things that are outside of the context of their work. But if I want to use that perspective to lead the project, it’s also my responsibility to make sure it gets run through the process. Another example, an animator should have the opportunity to offer feedback about the gameplay feel. But if I take that suggestion and execute it without running it through our Design stack, then I’ve undone their prerogative to make decisions about their space.

A lot of teams will see the value in ensuring everyone can provide feedback, but then they'll take a shortcut to receiving and processing that feedback, like having all-hands build reviews where everyone can just throw out feedback in an open forum. There's a time and place for that, but most of the time all you're going to do is get feedback that's unaware of the cross-disciplinary context, assumptions about which bits of feedback will and won't be executed, and an overall unclear decision-making process. It's always tempting to just put everyone in a room together and hash it out, but it can be really harmful to the creative clarity of the game and the process, especially as your team gets larger.

So, as a leader who wants to encourage this feedback but didn't want to be quite so messy about it, here's what I came up with: I have everyone on the team playtest the game once a sprint, record it, and send it to me along with notes about any unanswered questions they have, any feedback they feel hasn't been addressed, or ideas they’d like to pitch. I respond to everyone personally, but even something I agree with will need to go back through the process: if a programmer gives a note on environment art that makes sense to me, my first step is to go to my art director and ask her what she thinks. If it makes sense to her, too, then she'll fold it into her direction. If it doesn't, then we might spar on it for a few minutes before agreeing on a path forward, but I'm ultimately going to be pretty deferential to her expertise.

Is that particular feedback system a bit of extra work for me each sprint? Sure. But if I as a leader want the input, then the cost I pay is the time and attention to make sure the input is reviewed fairly and integrated in a responsible manner. Anything else would just be me taking a shortcut.

At this point, I’ll also bring in Maura Peterson, our Art Director, to give some perspective from the artists’ side of the shop.

Maura Peterson, Art Director at Serenity Forge: Because we’re an indie team we have to wear a lot of hats, as well (Parker often says “big hats”). So, freedom is vital in the sense that artists can and should be allowed to flex onto different disciplines that allow them to explore. We’ve made a lot of discoveries this way, on better methods of optimization, higher visual fidelity, and more compelling, coherent level design.

Usually, when our tech artists make discoveries, we strategize with the Director or Art Director to work out the pros and cons that come with changing a pipeline. I sometimes joke – but it’s true – that we apply the scientific method, where we ask what problem we are trying to investigate, form hypotheses, do our research, and reach a conclusion, which gives the Tech Artist the freedom they need to explore and experiment but also enough structure to stay on track in a production setting.

Approach to Education

One of the most important facets of our talent strategy is to always invite conversation about what people find interesting or challenging. Managers have frequent and candid conversations with their teams to make sure we can craft paths of growth and development for each employee that are informed not only by our needs and strategies but the employee’s, as well.

There are certainly occasions when we might encourage a particular educational opportunity for an employee, but much more frequently we find employees come to us and ask for a course we can reimburse for them, a mentorship (either inside or outside the company) we can help set up, or an experiment they can undertake. Since we’ve worked hard to build a culture and process around supporting our team’s development with time and finances, everyone knows their curiosities will be seen as a good investment for the company – because they are. We also have periodic events for employees to share knowledge and interests across teams and divisions, so we can ensure that those developmental investments spread and synthesize with others across the entire company.

Maura Peterson: As a creative leader, it’s important to know your people and be familiar with their needs. You should understand not only what they’re interested in and excited about, but also what they dislike doing. Obviously work is work, and sometimes we all have to bite the bullet and do something that is important but maybe not as fun for us. But, if you give your team tasks that they enjoy doing whenever possible and allow them to explore what’s interesting to them, then they will be much more engaged in the collaborative process (even when it isn’t as fun), and ultimately more excited about learning and improving.

In terms of specific resources, I shill for CGMA a lot, because their program has allowed me to grow so much as a professional artist (which Serenity Forge has been more than happy to encourage and pay for). We also have channels in our Slack to share knowledge and resources and encourage artists to keep their managers in the loop on any tutorials or tools that are helpful to their process. We’ll almost always pay those fees so artists can focus on creative and professional growth without worrying about the cost.

The Impact of COVID

COVID was a tough time for all of us personally and professionally. I was one of many people now on our team who joined Serenity Forge during the pandemic, and it was quite an adjustment to make sure we could continue to grow while maintaining those strong creative and professional bonds that are so easy to form when you’re all in person together. Fortunately, we were pretty well-equipped to handle the logistical challenges of remote (and, eventually, hybrid) collaboration, but it definitely left its mark on the studio. We may have already become accustomed to using quick voice calls and robust web-based planning and collaboration tools, but we still had some lessons to learn in terms of how to build a culture of productivity and accountability with those tools—and how to do it all at scale.

As the company has grown, we've built a diverse team with not only a wide range of backgrounds and skills, but also a wide range of work styles. One of the things COVID revealed most clearly is that we had some people who couldn't wait to get back to the office and some people who would kill to keep working at home. We had some people who thrived on a consistent 9-5 schedule, and some people who preferred to sprint hard and then sleep in with a more flexible schedule. There were myriad varieties of work needs and preferences on our team, and within all of them were excellent workers.

So, just as we had always encouraged a culture of personal diversity, we realized we also had to encourage a culture of work diversity. Some of this comes down to managers being able to set specific work-from-home policies for their teams, or having the discretion to choose hybrid collaboration tools that fit their team's needs. But some of it also came from establishing a philosophy among our managers that old metrics for seeing "productivity" don't actually mean anything anymore. Presence isn't a measure of productivity, nor is communication, nor is availability. All of these things are important in their own way in certain contexts (it's tough to work with someone who never communicates, or who's never available when their teammates have questions), but what we found is that, if you understand your team and can plan accordingly, all of those things are more flexible that you might have thought.

This has become especially important even beyond COVID as Serenity Forge expands our team across the globe. We have employees in at least a dozen states, multiple hemispheres, and a staggering number of time zones, and all of them need to be able to work toward our common goals. It simply wouldn't be practical for us to rely on a system where everyone has to be online at the same time, or has to come to the same meetings, or has to be available for anyone at any time.

Again, a lot of teams will take a shortcut and think that the most efficient thing is to pick a single system and apply it to everyone. "Our headquarters and most of the team are in Mountain Time, so everyone should work 9-5 MT" is a tempting solution. But not everyone who's great at their job likes working 9-5. Not everyone who's wonderful to work with likes meeting face-to-face. Not every amazing creative problem-solver reads their email. If you rely too heavily on or universally on the demonstration of any of those behaviors, you risk losing out on great talent who doesn't quite fit that mold. If you instead get a bit more granular with your process and can listen empathetically to your team members and how they work best, if you're attentive to what they need to succeed, and if you put in the time to plan proactively to ensure you can plug in their work at the right places and times, then you can earn the privilege of accessing the entire spectrum of excellent people.

Maura Peterson: I joined Serenity Forge during the pandemic, so I never really knew a pre-covid situation. I do miss having more coworkers to interact with in person. Having impromptu interactions with coworkers makes it easier to collaborate and not feel like you’re working so much in a vacuum. That said, technology has helped: things like Slack, Google Meets, Discord, Syncsketch, and Parsec all definitely make remote work much more manageable. I don’t think it damages productivity to work remotely, but I do think it can isolate team members if you aren’t careful, and don’t take an extra bit of effort to check in on people.

What Should Aspiring Artists Focus On?

Maura Peterson: Be hungry to learn. Technology is always changing and improving so it’s important to be aware of what’s going on in the industry and how we can adapt to improve ourselves and our team.

Be flexible. With small studios, it’s helpful to have multifaceted people who can pivot quickly to different kinds of tasks. In 3D Modeling, for example, we don’t have a “rock guy” or a “tree guy” who just makes one type of asset over and over again, in indie development, it’s important to have someone who is able to easily pick up skills in modeling all kinds of things, from creating tiled textures to environment modeling, to character modeling. 

Be collaborative. You can’t eat an elephant in one bite, and you can’t create a game all by yourself. Even solo developers need outside help from time to time, even if it’s something as small as asking for feedback. Art is a collaborative process, games even more, so it’s important to communicate with team members in order for us all to help better each other and provide different perspectives. 

Parker Davis, Development Director at Serenity Forge

Maura Peterson, Art Director at Serenity Forge

Interview conducted by Arti Burton