Leadership Guru Jurgen Appelo On “Managing for Happiness”

One of the characteristics of today’s world is our constant quest to improve ourselves and become as happy as possible, in both our private and work lives. At Goodgame, we are also continually working on building a better company and happy team because we are convinced that this is the basis for good games. That is also why we strive to improve our people management skills and why we invited Jurgen Appelo, author of the book Managing for Happiness, to our offices this week to give a talk about “games, tools, and practices that motivate any team”. The leadership guru’s mantra is that happy workers are productive workers, and in his inspiring speech, he shared some hands-on management techniques and ideas to foster personal development within teams. Read more

GOOD Teams: For Technical Integration, It’s All About Automation

Whoever thinks that development teams are a boring bunch with a dry job has not yet met our Technical Integration Team. In their own words, they are “the most fun team at Goodgame Studios” and, judging from the meeting that brought about this blog post, this is tough to argue against. When asked to explain what it is they do by someone without any programming knowledge or talent (i.e. me), they come up with all sorts of metaphors and images, such as putting up a series of advertisement posters where they provide the glue. Read more

Personal development at Goodgame Academy

Goodgame Studios has developed tremendously in many different areas over the last few years. Not that long ago, everyone sat together in the same room, and an artist for Goodgame Poker could shake the hand of their marketing colleague without even leaving their seat. Now we work across two different sites in Hamburg, separated into seven different studios, with a whole marketing department of our own and lots of other teams who all work hard to make our games successful. Nonetheless, we continue to collaborate very closely because we know that a game can only become really good when it’s created as a joint venture. To keep our collaboration running smoothly despite the constant change in the company, in 2014 our staff development team created the Goodgame Academy to help us develop our soft skills. Read more

Marvel of design and technology: the birth of Legends of Honor’s interactive world map

At the beginning of January, we officially launched our new strategy title, Legends of Honor. Since that day, hundreds of thousands of castles have been built while battle-hungry and iron-willed heroes steal across the massive world map. We believe that this achievement fully deserves a blog post of its own, so today we’d like to give you a look at the exciting creation of the world map. We also met with game designer Christoph, client developer Gregory, and concept artist Sven and asked them to share some exciting behind-the-scenes details. Read more