The inaugural Game Quality Awards 2024 has concluded with a spectacular celebration of talent, innovation, and dedication in the game quality craft. Held at Qualicon 2024, the awards honored individuals and teams who have made remarkable contributions to the discipline.
In this interview series, we will speak to our winners for 2024, continuing with Gareth Harding, representing the winner of the Team Award category, Media Molecule.
Game Quality: Congratulations on winning the Team Award at the first-ever Game Quality Awards! How are you and the team feeling about the win?
Gareth Harding, Media Molecule: Can’t quite believe it! While we always get so much love from the rest of the team here it’s always extra special when your efforts are recognised by your peers. We’d all like to say a massive thanks to everyone involved for this award.
GQ: Can you share some key factors that have contributed to your team’s success?
GH: We’ve always tried to maintain a degree of flexibility in our teams here and have been open to having people move out of their relative area of specialisation when they’ve wanted. We’ve always found that it’s enabled us to maintain a broad balance of experience across lots of different areas, this also allows a bit of a mental break from the day to day.
We’re also fortunate with the fact we’re treated on a level with everyone else development side and are included from day one. We’re involved from early on and taken through plans and designs and given space and time to feedback. We also have a lot of input into development processes and work closely with every group in the company and doing so means our goals naturally align so we all aim extremely high in everything we do.
We also try hard, across the studio and the QA team, to promote a Healthy work/life balance and mental wellbeing for the team. As a team we check in with each other regularly which with a remote team is important and enables everyone to feel like they have an outlet for any issues or problems they’re having.
GQ: What are some of the biggest challenges your QA team faces, and how do you effectively address them?
GH: I’m not sure we’re massively different to most other QA teams in this respect. The biggest challenges for us are ever growing and expansive or complex features coupled with the increasing needs of games post launch.
With features growing more complex we find we need to allow people the time to really get to know the feature and spend time with the team developing it, this way the feature and the implementation is understood. We’ve found with this approach that risks and mitigations tend to flow more freely between stakeholders and can be tackled early before they get too big.
GQ: How do you ensure that your processes stay up to date with the latest industry standards and best practices?
GH: When we’re working with partners it’s very much all about designing a process and defining standards that need to work for a lot of distinct groups. We try and give all the groups involved a stake in the ownership of designing and delivering new process or best practice. Having a good variety of differing opinions and different backgrounds we find always get you to a position where you’re covering a lot of bases.
We think it’s important to note that our team is also given the same opportunities as other developers within the studio to spend time in normal work hours learning new practices and then sharing that information with the rest of the team. This helps to foster appreciation for the work that we do in QA when we are afforded the same opportunities as other developers in the studio as well as promote confidence within the team that they are constantly evolving.
GQ: How does your team foster continuous improvement and professional development among its members?
GH: Giving everyone a voice we’ve found really helps. We often run our own QA retros as well as those with the wider development team. Sometimes it can be difficult to get people to find their voices, but we try and create an environment where we aren’t necessarily always doing this in meetings as they can be a little sterile, so we encourage information to be shared either directly or indirectly with seniors or leads. We also often run retro’s asynchronously, so people can add a post to a virtual board at any time and then meet regularly to discuss. It’s also important to make sure that there’s visible progress on the actions that come from these and improvements are celebrated.
We also have regular gatherings where we share any new processes where any one can bring up new or novel approaches to problems no matter how small they are. We also try and make sure we’re knowledge sharing wherever possible and make sure we leverage anything gained from other titles past and future.
GQ: What advice would you give to other teams and game quality professionals striving to achieve excellence?
GH: Be approachable and open to feedback and ideas on how to do things from all areas of the company. Be able to collaborate across various disciplines whether that be ourselves or art, audio, code, design or production and ensure that everyone’s on the same page. Don’t be afraid to reach out and have a breadth of knowledge and experience around either yourself or the team and take the time to gauge everyone’s opinion. There’s nothing wrong with setting sights high just make sure there’s soft landing and understanding if they don’t quite work out.
GQ: Is there a specific achievement that you’re most proud of as a team?
GH: Can I be greedy and mention two? The first was shipping Dreams, it was a very intricate tricky thing to test and seeing it go live was both exhilarating and incredibly scary. Seeing people’s creations come rolling in shortly after launch was also incredible and the way the QA team was able to move their focus from shipping a boxed product to support the community and then further updates was amazing to see and be a part of.
Second was how we as a studio dealt with the Covid outbreak – we had just released Dreams and there we were dealing with a lot of post release issues, feedback and starting to work on our own future update plans. To see how the whole team were able to carry on making progress through all the upheaval and stress of a global pandemic and seeing everyone band together, support each other and just generally be excellent to each other was a real credit to not only the QA team but the entire company.
GQ: Are there any final thoughts like to share with the rest of the Game Quality community?
GH: We’d like to thank all the support that Media Molecule gives the QA team to both grow within the industry as well as respecting the teams opinions when it comes to raising concerns, it’s meant that we have been able to thrive effectively within our own department as well as give the best support we can to the rest of the studio when someone needs us to bring a hammer to piece of software!
To see the full list of Game Quality Award 2024 winners, visit the awards website here or check out the winners announcement on our blog.
