GDC 2025 Session Viewer
The Game Maker's Zodiac: A Team-Building Tool
Isaque Sanches (Senior Game Designer, Ubisoft)
Pass Type: All Access Pass, Core Pass - Get your pass now!
Track: Design, Production & Team Leadership
Format: Lecture
Vault Recording: TBD
Audience Level: Intermediate
Folks in the games industry want to make games for many reasons: not everyone is motivated by the same things.
This lecture takes a look at different types of creators in the industry: not only by job family (code, design, art, audio, production, etc) but by grouping them by personality traits, backgrounds, aesthetic preferences and biases.
From there, a general high-level breakdown is presented: the lecturer proposes 13 archetypes for videogame creators, based on research (cross-referencing literature and collected data), and invites you to explore how these might communicate with one another, what are the strengths and weaknesses of each archetype grouping, and how they can all work in harmony by co-empowering each other.
Takeaway
The audience self-examines their own strengths as individual game developers; they also learn new tools to identify differences in creative styles within their team, new vocabulary to articulate those differences, and techniques to create better synergies between team members.
Intended Audience
Core audience: Designers of all kinds (system / level / feel design, etc) working in mid-large teams; and anyone within the production job family (and/or hiring managers).
Broader audience: Anyone in the game development industry (regardless of experience, company size, background, job family, etc) could also get some interesting takeaways.
