“Tech Days” at Pixonic: giving developers freedom to dream

Companies from Google, to Apple, to LinkedIn, have famously given their employees time to work on creative pursuits beyond their typical work — and Pixonic is no different. In this article, we explain our approach, the impressive results, and how we avoid potential pitfalls.

Here’s the bottom line: game development is a creative process. But creativity doesn’t exactly harmonize with the stereotypical monotony of the typical 9 to 5 workday schedule. So, as creatives, we must do everything in our power to avoid the familiar evils that can result from this: burnout, loss of interest, diminished productivity, extinguished passion.

But how? Well, we believe it’s good to create time and space for game development professionals to be able to use their imaginations, explore, and to go beyond their typical work experience. Of course, this also benefits studios themselves — new features, and even entire independent products have been created as a result of such initiatives.

This isn’t a new concept at all: you’ve probably heard about such initiatives at companies like Google, Apple, and LinkedIn. (More on that in a moment).

I’m Boris Burangulov, a producer on War Robots. At Pixonic studios, inspired by the examples above, we decided to implement our own, similar initiative. Of course, as a unique company with unique needs, we’ve adapted our approach to suit our purposes. In our case, this takes the form of special workdays, which we have informally christened as “Tech Days”. We believe our method is right for us (and who knows, maybe it’d be good for you, too!)

Here’s a brief outline of what we’ll cover in this article:

• Other company efforts to break out of the creativity-killing routines
• What are “Tech Days” at Pixonic?
• Tech Days’ social and emotional benefits
• Tech Days’ practical, innovative results
• Potential drawbacks we’ve encountered and how we combat them
• And how we plan to keep improving our process

With that, let’s dive in!

Google’s “20% rule” and other employee empowering initiatives

Perhaps the most well-known example of this idea is Google’s 20% rule. Basically, employees can devote 20% of their working time (effectively one day per week) to independent projects. Well-known projects like Gmail and AdSense were developed as a result of this concept, as well as hundreds of smaller features, with many eventually becoming open source products.

In fact, even such giants like Atlassian and Apple adopted similar approaches. The latter called its program Blue Sky, allowing employees to set aside their usual tasks for two weeks to work on new projects.

At LinkedIn, their take on it was the [in]cubator program, where employees could pitch their project and, if given the green light, work on it for the next three months.

“Tech Days” at Pixonic

Now, on to Pixonic! At its most basic level, our “Tech Days” event is a workday where employees are free to do some other tasks, rather than those related to their main workflow.

(There is a condition: we can’t work on pet projects during this time. Although we should still work on something related to our main project, we’re free to imagine a task you’d simply like to complete.)

If you’re not fully on board yet, stick with me, perhaps it’s better to illustrate with some examples, and some success stories.

Let’s say:

• A developer has been wanting to develop a new feature prototype
• Some has been longing to fix a small bug that has been bugging them
• An engineer has wanted to do some minor refactoring that otherwise has been outside their available time.

Sometimes, pressing deadlines or critical priorities simply make it impossible to deal with tasks like those above during normal working hours. (Well, of course, if we’re really talking about some minor things, it might be possible to make the time to just fix them.) However, if you need a colleague’s help to complete a task, the issue related to lack of time is really compounded — and that’s one way where Tech Days really come to the rescue.

Tech Days emotional impacts

In general Tech Days have been a positive experience for us, so let’s run down a quick list of why:

• We get a break from the usual routine — variety is the spice of life, no?
• We can break out of our shells. For instance, some colleagues have gotten to know other departments and learned about their work, their processes, and just, their lives! This includes the Support Team, Game Design Department, and so on.
• It’s given us the opportunity to develop prototypes, which have grown into full-fledged features: game modes, art updates, and so on.
• It’s just fun!

Tech Days practical results

After each Tech Days, there’s a special meeting with the producer and team leaders. The Tech Days results are reviewed and it’s decided what can be taken to productions: timelines are defined, resources are allocated. In fact, War Robots has already seen some features born on Tech Days reach production.

For example, we’d been thinking about a new game mode (more info soon) for a long time, but weren’t sure if we should start working on it. So, on one of the Tech Days a small team gathered and managed to assemble a basic prototype. Upon seeing the result, we immediately realized that we wanted it live in production! And so it was.

Another key improvement also appeared as a result of a Tech Days: a diverse group, with the folks from the UI, Art and Client Development departments came together. Their objective? Making life easier for players (and themselves). With the event chests feature, the scene with the chests had been created quite a long time ago. This caused various bugs that had to be fixed every time.

One Tech Days day, the team prototyped a new scene rendering technology. This helped eliminate some issues in the event preparation process, and also made chests open in a more impressive way:

Sometimes, certain features had their fates decided on Tech Days. For a long time, our backlog contained a “quality-of-life” task — viewing a player’s profile from another platform (this feature was cut when creating cross-platform matchmaking). Unfortunately, there’s always a list of things with a higher priority. Here, the matter was further complicated because the task seemed rather time-consuming, and even with regards to RnD evaluation. But, during one of our Tech Days, a developer looked into the issue: if the implementation were simplified a little, everything could be accomplished with little resources. With this, the task was finally pushed into the scope of the next release.

There were also cases where a day’s developments didn’t go into production in a linear way. For example, the devs created a prototype for a new painting technology — the guns on the mechs were painted in the color of the robot’s skin, without creating additional textures, and thus avoiding the need to increase the size of the build. Ultimately, we considered this feature to be unnecessary (the automatic painting of the guns), but, nevertheless, we found a way to apply an idea developed on Tech Days to some other features.

Of course, the examples described above are some of the most notable Tech Days results. That said, actually, most of the work accomplished on these days involves small fixes and improvements. And, of course, some colleagues are unable (or lack time) to carry out their plans. This happens — and it’s totally normal, too! With our Tech Days, the journey is just as important as the destination.

Keeping the Tech train on the tracks

At this point, we must note that while creativity is the golden goose of game development, the things we’ve discussed here shouldn’t come at the expense of an employee’s primary project production. Perhaps more importantly, Tech Days initiatives should not negatively impact employee personal time, that is, they shouldn’t lead to crunch time or overtime. It would be extremely unacceptable if, because of one of our Tech Days, a colleague would have to work on their usual tasks at night.

And actually, that’s why we don’t have Tech Days just whenever we want to: we choose a time period when there are no pressing release risks. We always schedule Tech Days in advance, and we plan them together with sprints and a release scope.

And there is one other thing we have to mention about Tech Days: there’s no guarantee that anything we work on during these days will eventually end up in production. At the end of the day, there is a production plan that needs to be followed. And even if we have the coolest prototype in the universe, there may simply not be enough resources to continue developing it. Therefore, we must not forget that work on Tech Days can simply end up in the desk drawer — such are the rules of the game, alas!

Improving our Tech Days

By now, this has become an established way of working for us, and we plan to continue. So, we’re not only trying to regularly hold Tech Days, we also collect feedback from the team and introduce changes in order to make them more useful for everyone.

For instance, previously, our initiative was called a “Tech Day”, and it lasted exactly one day — makes sense, right? But we realized that very little significant work can be done in such a short time. So, now we hold these events less frequently, but, to compensate they last two working days in a row. Our colleagues have a more realistic shot at realizing some bigger ideas.

We also started collecting lists of ideas to be implemented within Tech Days: some colleagues wanted to participate, but couldn’t readily formulate a task idea for that day. Now, they can just take a pick from the list, if they wish.

And, perhaps the most striking change has happened naturally. During Tech Days team members began to group up into mini-teams, allowing them to work on more complex prototypes, almost like full-fledged features.

You can’t rush art

Finally, it’s also worth pointing out that not everyone has the opportunity to participate in this event. Some team members might have pressing tasks, and thus, they may decide to skip Tech Days, and work on the current release instead. And that’s totally acceptable.

We consider participation in Tech Days to be completely optional — there’s no shame in choosing to work on your main tasks for that day. (And while Tech Days have definitely resulted in some marvelous inventions, there are probably a few project managers who are pretty happy to have folks working on their primary projects, too!)