One of the biggest challenges any developer faces is that of how many games to make and when to make them. The problem, as ever, lies in the need to balance monetary and creative considerations.

Having signed their first publishing agreement, many developers put as many games as possible into production. The reason for this is financial insecurity. At any stage a publisher may decide to can your game. As developers rely on their publisher as their only source of income, this can have disastrous consequences. By having a number of games in concurrent production you’re clearly reducing this risk. One developer I know of has a tripod system where at any one time they have three games in production. The idea is that if you lose one, then the other two will keep the company up.

There are though problems with this. When a company grows past a certain size, you need a more formal management set-up. With a small team you can keep a flat hierarchy, which is great for morale. People aren’t so hung up on job roles and are more willing to roll their sleeves up to get things done. One of the things that most pleased me recently was the sight of the entire company helping the office manager to stuff envelopes for a mailout!

Another problem is the speed of growth. To put three projects into production you’ll probably need to find forty to sixty staff in a very short period of time. You can do this, but at a price. Making sure that you recruit the right people is just about the most important thing you’ll ever do. Making games is a lifestyle not a job and as such you’re often with the same people for six days a week, for anything up to sixteen hours a day, sometimes under incredibly stressful conditions. To do this successfully you need a tightknit team, preferably consisting of people who get on so well that that they’re actually working for each other rather than for themselves or the company. Finding forty to sixty people of the requisite calibre, and then moulding them into such a team is extremely difficult, more so if you’re trying to do it in short space of time. It’s far better to grow gradually and organically.

Our objective is to keep Elixir at a size of twenty to twenty five people for the foreseeable future. We’re taking on people at a rate of about one every other month. We’re still looking for more, but it’s very hard finding the right people. The reason for this is that you’re looking for two things in potential team members. Firstly, obviously, they’ve got to be very talented. Secondly, they’ve got to have the right attitude, with drive and enthusiasm. I see the relationship between talent and attitude as a little like that of a racing car and it’s driver. Whereas a good driver can get the most out of an average car (like Schumacher in his first season at Benetton), a poor driver will always underperform, irrespective of the quality of his car (such as David Coulthard in the Maclaren). There are few things I dislike more than wasted talent, which may be symptomatic of my long-suffering devotion to Liverpool FC!

To make matters even harder, the small team approach means employing people with a range of skills rather than taking specialists. I’ve found that having people from a range of professional backgrounds has really helped with this. Gavin, our new artist, comes from a comic book background, having previously worked for DC Comics (Batman and Lobo). Some of his hand drawn artwork is quite breathtaking and this skill has been invaluable to us in creating conceptual artwork. He’s certainly got the right attitude as well. When asked to describe himself he said "I’m good at fighting and have got lots of women following me around", which makes me think we were right to take him on; an extravagant imagination is one of the traits I most value in an artist, as is the ability to laugh heartily at oneself!

No matter how close a team is there will always be arguments. Tempers occasionally flare up, and usually it’s nothing more than a case of handbags at dawn. Resolving these is one of the harder jobs I do and I’ve found that adding humour helps enormously. This process has been helped considerably by the acquisition of a rather tasteful pink office handbag which, for added style, was purchased in Skegness. A raised voice is usually greeted by an office-wide cry of "handbags!" The target of this cry is then forced to carry the handbag, slung elegantly across his shoulder for the remainder of the day. This never fails lighten the mood.

On the subject of laughing at oneself, I should tell you about Dynamo Elixir, our five-a-side team, which has recently been seen ‘gracing’ the Monday night tournament at Spitalfields market in London. Our record after two weeks was played six, lost six, scored one, conceded twenty-two. As you can imagine, for a group of people who are obsessed with games and particularly with winning them, this was a bitter pill to swallow. It’s been an excellent experience though. I’ve no doubt that at different times over the next few years of development we’re going to be up against it. Winning is the easy part – everyone can do that. It’s when the chips are down that as a team you succeed or fail and you only really see what people are made of in adversity. It was in this context that we played our seventh game last Monday night, a real derby against the sheer athleticism of fellow strugglers "Who Ate All The Pies". We prevailed 4-1, as the mighty Piemen were swept aside by our own version of Total Football. When it comes to it, we may not be Brazil, but who knows, we may even achieve midtable respectability one day. All of which reminds me of something that Vince Lombardi, legendary coach of the Green Bay Packers, once said: "Winning isn’t everything, but wanting to win is."

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