Our sister site, GameCareerGuide, helps new developers find and build their best career path. Recently, a post from a developer and graduate student asked an important question: How do you get the most out of your dev team brainstorming sessions?
In the full feature article, Bullpup Games' Andrew Curley offers advice to fellow developers:
"Team leaders must create their own boundaries to the brainstorming sandbox.
I've found that a top-down approach works best here. Start the discussion by asking the team about their skills and broad interests - genre, tone, style - and write them down on sticky notes. The team leaders should participate in this exercise themselves, but more importantly, they must watch the situation unfold.
The game designer should be looking for patterns of repeating ideas and preferences, and the producer should take note of both the dominant and reserved personalities of the group. This information is vital to the health of the team in the pre-production phase and beyond."
You can read Curley's full post over at GameCareerGuide now -- along with a wealth of other useful advice, how-tos and postmortems for beginning developers.