Your Time Is Precious
Tips to build quicker, hire better, and get more from (foreign) consultants.
I went straight into building a mobile game knowing absolutely nothing about that industry. In order to move faster, I hired game developers on Upwork, and designers on 99Designs even though I am an engineer myself. I set a budget for side projects and self-development per year. I use 2 weeks of salary at most — not everyone can afford to do that but if you do, I believe it will pay off. I also started reading everything I could find on developing games.
About eight months ago, I stumbled upon an idea from my long list of ideas which seemed like the perfect fit for a side project. The game is attractive by itself. I have already solved the single technical challenge of this project which I will reveal it on my landing page soon. This post is about the importance of speed when building a project. I use the word ‘consultant’ to refer to foreign consultants with a depreciated currency with specific technical skills.
Milestones — especially when you don’t know what you are building, write a detailed description of a single goal, and have lots of visual aids
The first consultant I hired was from Eastern Europe and paid on an hourly basis. I expected to receive weekly updates and explanations on how to solve problems I didn't quite understand. No need to say I wasted a third of my budget giving the developer weekly tasks just as you would run a Scrum shop.
I composed every milestones after that with an organized folder containing a single README.txt, and lots of visual aids from Balsamiq, or screenshots of the previous prototypes. It’s best to discuss upfront what the developer think about your milestone description. If you ask about a deadline and receive an unclear answer, it might be okay to look for somebody else. In fact, I worked with four different developers and two designers to get where I wanted.
Consultants are not like you. They won’t be interested in learning a new skill with each project. Their goal is to finish the project as fast as possible to grow their revenue. And your goal shouldn’t be any different when working with consultants. It’s best to judge what you can get out of your consultants ahead of time. The general rule is that you can only get 2 out of the 3: speed, quality, and cheap. The foreign consultants tend to be in the speed/cheap category. It will be up to you to test the product you receive.
Hard Deadlines — give consultants a year to design a bike and receive a jetpack that doesn’t work. Give them a day, and get your MVP that works or nothing at all.
Don’t be afraid to give same-day deadline for a milestone or the entire project. You will be surprised — they train for that, and most will accomplish what you need in your timeframe. In my experience, if they don’t complete it by your deadline, they will fail to complete the project entirely. As soon as there are gaps in their skills/knowledge, suddenly the money becomes a lot less attractive for them. You need to figure that out as soon as you can.
“Work expands so as to fill the time available for its completion”
- Parkinson’s law
I started hiring consultants thinking they were the same kind of engineer that I am — driven by stability, scale, elegance, perfection… all of that works fine in Scrum shops where you continuously improve (forever?). A consultant will be gone by the time the project is over, and if you have another project, that consultant probably won’t be right for you. The best platforms to recruit consultants are reverse bidding platforms. Consultants will bid on your job post. That will ensure that the consultant is interested and capable, and mostly likely fast for this project.
I also used 99Designs. Within a week I had tens of different ideas on how to design my game. You can parallelize the ‘discovery process’ and pay only your favorite designer! You have to take advantage of those platforms. Right there, I just saved weeks thank to at least 10 designers who tried to acquire my business.
I quickly became a premium member of Freepik a platform where you can download any asset you need. Make sure you ask your designer if they used any kind of resources that you need a license for commercial use. Consultants will use outside resources to speed up their work.
Understand the framework that’s right for you — especially if you are not technical
The first piece of code I received was built in Cocos2d. The entire game was built in just four days by a developer somewhere around the world. The code may not be as good as you want it but quality can always be improved later.
Today, I am actually using Unity3D, an amazing platform and comunnity for game developers. Some may say that I wasted money not knowing the platform I needed from the start and that’s definitely true. But out of that first try, I was able to write the best description of the game for Unity3D with screenshots. It wasn’t a surprise that another consultant built everything I actually needed in just under a week.
If you are a developer, I highly recommend to review and improve the code yourself or even rewrite it from scratch. Speed/Cheap is great, but you will want an app that doesn’t crash your user’s phone. If you are not a developer, you’ll need to test the game with iOS TestFlight for example. You can ask your consultants to install Crashalytics to record any crash. You should QA the game yourself to make sure you have all your functionality.
Your time is precious. Make the best of it with all those tools! Good luck!
Amazing videos by unity3d about setting goals, and completing a project:
https://unity3d.com/learn/tutorials/topics/developer-advice/how-start-your-game-development
A must read: The Lean Startup by Eric Ries
