The long development cycle of Elephant in the Relationship has taught the team, and me especially, many lessons about tabletop game development, production, and keeping a team working. I’ll be speaking about our experience at this year’s IndieCade 2018 with my talk Keeping the Band Together.

The team behind Elephant in the Relationship took some time off during the development of the game (five years!) before coming back together in Fall 2017 to finally finish the game. During this time, the team separated geographically across states and time zones, got other jobs, got married, and focused on other work. This session will use our personal experience with the development of Elephant in the Relationship to discuss the challenges and opportunities in revisiting apparently “ abandoned” projects. We expect to raise (and hopefully answer) several questions around this situation, including

  • Does the perspective of time help or hinder a project?
  • How do you rescope a project after some time off?
  • How might teams balance the time needed to work on a project while maintaining other commitments like jobs and relationships?
  • Does it make sense to maintain the original distribution of labor on the project or revisit that along with the project itself?
  • If an enterprise began as a passion project, how do you reignite that passion later on? Or do you bother?
  • If perfection is the enemy of done, how do you work toward a final project without abandoning it again?

Finally, we’ll look at how indie teams can use technology to continue working together on projects (even when the projects themselves are analog and not digital).

The talk will be held on Saturday, October 13, 2018, from 11:00 am to 11:25 am in Classroom 2 at the brand new Center for Media and Design at Santa Monica College, 1660 Stewart Street in Santa Monica.

You can find out more about the talk at IndieCade’s site here.