Interviewing and Team Formation

The last few weeks have been very busy for me.  It is my first time to go through the process of interviewing Southern Methodist University Guildhall students and placing them on game development teams for the first time.  These students are members of the 18^th guildhall cohort (aka class) and are participating in their second team group project.  During this project, the students will develop a game from concept through alpha.  As their associate producer, I was responsible for interviewing a portion of them.  After the interviews were over I participated in a meeting with my fellow assistant producers and producer to place the students on teams.

Interviewing the students was not too difficult due to the fact we were limited to asking them only five questions.  These questions were designed to help the interviewers evaluate the attitude, social skills, planning skills, initiative, and insight of the student being interviewed.  The responses I received to these five questions as well as the information I found while reviewing the student’s resume provided me with enough information to make reasonably educated decisions in the team formation meeting I went to later that afternoon.  I loved being able to get to know the students more.  The search for an individual’s strengths and weaknesses and the way in which those strengths and weaknesses can be used and managed is positively fascinating!

The process of placing the students on teams was just as interesting as the interview process.  The team formation meeting lasted a while, as each of us associate producers had to share the insights we learned about each student during the interviews.  As we put the teams together we tried our best to balance the teams based on skill, specialization, and personality.  It’s a challenge to put together teams when you know so little about the team members.  Our Producer then took the list of teams we had formed and showed it to other faculty members to get their insight on the draft teams.  She wanted to make sure that other teachers who have worked with these particular students before did not see any major issues with the team formations.

I can’t wait to see how these teams work out once we get into development of the game!