Hi everybody! We’re back from our summer vacations, hard at work with Lake Ridden again! Here’s an interview about the game that we gave on Gameumentary a few days ago! They make in-depth interviews and are now looking to launch a series of game documentaries!
Before going on vacation we conducted everyone’s Performance Coaching Reviews, to see how the crew feels about working at Midnight Hub, what motivates each individual, what we could improve, if people satisfied with the planning etc. We try to do this each 6 months to improve the studio and make sure we have nice core values and a decent work environment for everybody. The games industry is unfortunately known to sometimes be quite crushing with a lot of overtime and poor working conditions…We really try put the team first, without them no game is going to get made. And it feels good to be nice too! One of the visions we had when founding Midnight Hub was to do our best to build a studio where we minimize overtime and stress, and boost creativity and respect!
I think that trust goes both ways. If you trust your team they will show trust in you. We have made the decision to cut down our work days so that we now work 9-17, with one hour for lunch. Before this, people could work 8-17 or 9-18, with one hour for lunch. There is plenty of research showing that if you have a job that requires lots of brainpower and creativity you get a maximum of 6-7 hours of real work done in a day. So I think that by giving people some more time for families, hobbies and exercise we will hopefully have a more well rested and motivated team in the end. This becomes even more important to us now that we are entering a work-heavy phase after the summer is over.
Other than this we got started on a very cool Lake Ridden-related project this summer (pic above). We’ll share more when we feel the time is right!
Cheers,
Sara & The Team