GDC 2025 Session Viewer

If you break down everything that goes into making a game, and improve each thing by just one percent, you'll have a significant improvement when you put them all together.

This talk from Studio Gobo's Lead Designer Adam Russell will go into detail about how to build marginal gains into your team's development process, and create a mindset that empowers individual team members to identify and action micro-improvements that, when combined, compound to create improvements that benefit everyone all the way from our dev team to our players.

Using examples from LEGO Horizon Adventures, Adam will discuss how marginal gains has become a development mantra at Studio Gobo. Including how to build this into your teams at a process and features level, the benefits of doing this all the way through development, and how to overcome some of the challenges you may face.

Takeaway

If you make something 1% better every day, after one year it will be 37 times better.

Attendees will see first-hand how compounding marginal improvements makes developing games a better experience for their teams, as well as delivering a more enjoyable product for their players

Intended Audience

This presentation is primarily intended for people in senior and leadership positions, who are well-placed to share these learnings with their teams and integrate the philosophy into their studio culture.

However, everyone will be able to take the learnings from this presentation and apply them to their work or day-to-day lives