Working In Teams

tim-cain teams collaboration game-development self-awareness career

Abstract

Problem: Working in teams is inevitable in the game industry, yet developers rarely examine what makes team dynamics succeed or fail.

Approach: Tim Cain draws parallels between a Duran Duran documentary and his own 40+ year game development career, analyzing how team members intersect, diverge, and sometimes reunite.

Findings: Successful teamwork requires deep self-awareness — knowing your strengths, your authority level, your passion, and how you handle criticism. Teams produce games shaped by the collective talents present, not just by any single vision.

Key insight: Understanding yourself — your strengths, weaknesses, authority, and passions — is the single most important factor in working well on a team.

Source: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=yqk-A-MmrbE

1. The Duran Duran Parallel

Tim stumbled on a Duran Duran documentary on Netflix and found it spoke directly to his experience as a game developer. The documentary's structure — band forms, peaks, members leave, eventually reunite — mirrored patterns he'd seen across his career.

1.1. People Intersect, Then Diverge

The band members all came from different backgrounds in Birmingham. They intersected at Duran Duran but were heading in different directions. This explains both why the band worked and why it eventually broke apart — they weren't in permanent agreement, they were passing through a shared space.

Tim recognized this pattern in game studios. When you join a new company or start a new project, there's an energizing feeling from working with different people who have different ideas, processes, and goals. It makes you re-examine things you took as pillars on the last project.

1.2. On Stage vs. Off Stage

The band members realized the magic happened on stage — when they were actually doing their thing. Off stage, they diverged into different interests and musical directions. Tim maps this to game development: the magic is in the work itself, not in everything surrounding it.

1.3. The First Bad Review

Simon Le Bon described how their first poorly-reviewed album was an awful experience after a streak of increasingly praised records. But once they got through it, it was freeing — subsequent lower reviews never stung as badly.

Tim relates this directly to his own career: his games have gone up and down in popularity, sales, critical reviews, and player reviews — and none of those correlate with how he personally feels about the games. This is simply what happens when you make more than one game.

1.4. Still Here After 40 Years

The documentary ended with the observation that being still together after 40+ years "says something." Tim, with his own 40+ year career, felt that deeply — whether it speaks to stubbornness, perseverance, or talent, he's not sure, but it says something.

2. Authority and Passion Don't Correlate

Tim breaks down his own contribution to each game as a combination of two factors:

  • Authority — how much decision-making power he had
  • Passion — how much the game aligned with what he personally wanted to make

These two factors are not correlated. He's loved games where he had little say, and grown tired of games where he had full control. His authority has ranged from "the buck stops with me" to peer-level shared control to having authority actively taken away.

When he wasn't the one in charge, his motivation often shifted from passion to curiosity — wanting to see how someone else would make decisions, how they'd solve problems he never figured out.

3. What the Team Brings

Every game is shaped by the collective talents on the team. Tim identifies several dimensions:

3.1. Agreement on Direction

Some people join a team and immediately fit — suggesting ideas that perfectly match the world, the lore, and the design pillars. Others seem to be constantly trying to make a different game. Tim would sometimes tell people: "That's a great idea, it just doesn't belong in this game."

3.2. Collective Strengths Define the Game

Games end up being what the team can do. The clay heads in Fallout looked the way they did because they had a really good sculptor. Other games lacked features Tim wanted simply because nobody on the team could execute them — including him.

3.3. The Difficulty of Critique

The hardest team situations arise when members aren't self-aware about their own strengths. When someone is working on something they're not good at, convinced they'll get through the rough stage, and you can see it's not going to work — giving that critique is extremely difficult because people get wrapped up in what they're doing.

4. The Lesson

Unless you're a solo indie developer, you will work in teams. The key to doing it well is self-knowledge:

  • What are you good at? What aren't you good at?
  • How do you give and receive criticism?
  • How much do you agree with the game's direction?
  • How much will you push to change it?
  • What authority do you have? Where is your passion?

Understanding all of this about yourself makes teamwork go much more smoothly. Or as Tim puts it: "If you don't believe me, take it from Duran Duran."

5. References