Successful officeless game studio tells its secrets

"If you want to reward the staff for working quickly, you can’t make 'hours worked' a constant, because then only quality and quantity remain variable. In a traditional situation where 'hours worked' is a constant, the reward for working quickly and efficiently is just getting more work."

If only my current employer understood this.

"I hope I am not the first person to tell you this, but nobody reads design documents. In fact, when working at larger studios, I made a habit of inserting the line “I will pay $5 to anyone who reads this sentence” into the center of any document over 50 pages. In 10 years of development nobody ever asked for their money."

I knew it!

"There is no point in tying up your best resources with work that could be done perfectly well by more junior staff, or work that could be done faster or better by specialists[...] So what we do is keep senior generalists on staff to create the structure and core design of the game, and then we outsource the bulk asset production to specialists and managed studios that we hire on task-based contracts."

I imagine this could get time-consuming for whoever finds and hires all these temporary task-based contractors -- but as an employee it certainly sounds appealing to be able to focus on the higher level while the lower level is quickly and expertly handled elsewhere.

Their games don't seem to be all that good: http://www.boomzap.com/