Without a doubt, since the emergence of video games until now, countless teams and studios—both small and large—have been formed for game development. Ultimately, behind their efforts, they have either succeeded, or, on the difficult and grueling path of game development, given up on their ambitions. Despite all these circumstances, we still see many people around us stepping into game development with great passion and enthusiasm, trying to traverse the path to building a successful game as quickly as possible. Usually, such activities eventually lead to the formation of small and lovable game development teams. But is everything really that simple?

Undertale on Steam
UNDERTALE! The RPG game where you don’t have to destroy anyone.
STEAM

The question that arises right at the outset is: how many people do we really need to produce a successful game? If we take a look at the successful video games of recent years, we see that in this long and colorful list, we have both successful games made by a single person and games made by a large studio with hundreds of employees. We don't have to look far—let's start with Undertale. This game's PC version currently holds a masterpiece score of 92 from 43 reviews, and its PlayStation 4 version holds a 93 from 15 reviews (though the PC version was released in 2015). With a simple search, you can see that only one name is listed as the developer of this game, and that is Toby Fox. On the other hand, there are also games like Super Meat Boy, Braid, and World of Goo that were made by two people and have earned very high scores as well. Meanwhile, large studios with high headcounts also exist in this industry, producing very high-quality games—which there's no need to name.

Outlast 2 on Steam
Outlast 2 introduces you to Sullivan Knoth and his followers, who left our wicked world behind to give birth to Temple Gate, a town, deep in the wilderness and hidden from civilization. Knoth and his flock are preparing for the tribulations of the end of times and you’re right in the thick of it.
STEAM

But again, don't assume there's a fixed rule here where the bigger a game gets, the bigger the development team necessarily becomes. For example, do you remember the successful game Outlast 2 by Red Barrels studio? This well-crafted 3D game was the result of the collaboration of only 17 people. Similarly, games like Limbo and Inside were the product of roughly 20 to 25 people working together. Although we might all agree that building games like God of War or Gears of War would likely require the collaboration of several hundred people, at the medium and small scales there is almost no fixed rule in this regard. Depending on how you manage the studio's workflow, as well as the quality and level you have envisioned for your game, you can have a highly variable number of people within your studio. Sometimes time isn't your main metric, and two or three of you work on a project for three years, and the result is something like Braid. But sometimes time is very important to you, and you try to build your game with more people but in less time. Given all this, though, is there no definite metric available for determining the number of members on a game's development team? Let's address this topic with an example in this installment of our game development tutorial articles.

The best situation for your team is one in which the people within the team understand the meaning and concept of teamwork and its accompanying challenges, and see the team's success as their own success and its failure as their own failure.

One of the problems that usually arises for fledgling game development teams is that, amid their initial excitement and enthusiasm, these people try to recruit as many members as they can, sweet-talking any of their friends who have at least played or enjoyed one video game into joining their team. This may be exciting in the short term, but in the long term it only leads to the team's failure and downfall. Of course, the existing problems aren't limited to the baseless formation of a game development team, but no one can deny that a good team with a single, unified goal can overcome many problems, big and small. We all know that game development—especially in one's early experiences—is like an unknown land, and so we should expect many strange and bizarre problems. The people who can overcome these problems are those who truly believe in their path and haven't merely gathered together for a meager salary.

Unfortunately, one of the issues that many of today's games in Iran's game industry are caught up in is exactly this, which is why creativity is rarely seen within them. But in any case, we don't want to talk about some paradise where everyone lives beyond money and such matters, either. The best situation for your team is one in which the people within the team understand the meaning and concept of teamwork and its accompanying challenges, and see the team's success as their own success and its failure as their own failure. If, after all your efforts, you were only able to find one or two people with these qualities, know that the existence of these one or two people will be better for you than having 100 uncommitted individuals. This is because such people don't hide their ideas for the team's success, and when necessary, they are willing to work for the team in a self-sacrificing way, going beyond the usual, to overcome the challenges ahead. In such a case, increasing the development time can compensate for the shortage of team members—but what matters is that the final quality of your game will be guaranteed.

But alongside this issue, there is another matter that is also very important. Although there are successful examples of one-person games, having at least two categories of skills within the game development team is always helpful for advancing the work better. The first category relates to artistic work and, in some cases, the animation associated with it, and the second category relates to the game engine and the programming associated with it. Almost all independent games in the world's game development industry have followed this minimal rule and have had these two categories of skills within their teams. One person is responsible for the artistic work and animation, while the other handles the programming and the implementation of components within the game engine. Tasks such as level design usually have their own approaches as well. One of the members takes responsibility for designing the main framework of the levels, and after completing it, more details are added in collaboration with the other members of the group—so it takes on a kind of interactive form. As for sound and so on, ready-made samples or outsourcing are usually used.

Let's take another look at the question from the beginning of the article. How many people do we really need to produce a good game? In fact, this question has no definite answer. You are free to have as many people as you want within your team, but note that the number of people will not be a guarantee of your game's success; rather, the members' commitment, as well as your creativity in generating ideas, are the most important metrics of your success. Of course, always try to recruit people in proportion to your project, and don't operate in such a way that you first recruit people and then sit down and see what game you can make with the members you've gathered!

The number of people will not be a guarantee of your game's success; rather, the members' commitment, as well as your creativity in generating ideas, are the most important metrics of your success.

In closing, it's worth knowing that initially the plan was to take a look at a number of well-known game development teams and compare their structural compositions with one another. But after examining a few of them, we came to the conclusion that there really is no defined mechanism for this, and each team has recruited relevant skills in proportion to the distinctive features of its own game. For example, do you remember Firewatch with its interesting graphics? Within their team there was a dedicated specialist for environment and lighting—something that doesn't exist within many small and medium teams. That's why we decided to speak a bit more fundamentally and examine the hidden points within this topic together. Of course, if you're still curious to learn more about the skill structure of a number of the world's well-known game development teams, you can refer to the links we've prepared for you below and get acquainted up close with the members and skills present within these teams.