"I'm really excited about the direction the industry is taking," said Vijay Thakkar, toy maker (aka technical director) at Zynga with Friends.

His talk at GDC Smartphone Summit was entitled Changing the way we make games: The transition from AAA to mobile development.

"The mobile industry is the new indie game sector. We can be innovative in new ways."

"We try to build games in a few months, which means we have to cut down ideas, work collaboratively, and everyone works hard."

This philosophy results in a 'Let's Try It' approach, where if decisions can't be made quickly, people just spend an afternoon creating something.

"Don't fear the mistakes. Embrace them," he stated.

As with many in the industry, Zynga with Friends works on a Minimum Viable Product basis, which enables it to make games fast, identify problems early and deal with feedback from users, who will play your games, perhaps in different ways to what you expect.

Viable is a word you have to define however. "You have to clarify what viable means for your business," Thakkar warned.

All together

Of course, the people you have in your company are critical in terms of providing the foundation to new ways of working.

"We push to hire flexible employees. These are people who can be constructive to grow themselves and grow the team," he said.

This flows through to everyone in Zynga with Friends being labeled a Toy Maker, as a way of reducing hierarchy and internal politics.

It also uses a lot of open source software and don't build a lot of inhouse tools unless people have a specific problem to solve.

Work hard, work fast

Maintaining this 'indie start up passion' sees the company trying to reduce meetings as much as possible, while working hard for eight hours a day and then go home, rather than crunching for 16 hours.

"Concentrating hard for eight hours a day made me more tired than crunching because I was being more productive," Thakkar said.

This feeds through into what the company calls library days on Tuesdays and Thursdays, where there aren't any meetings and people only check their email first and last thing in the day, and focus on the work in hand.

And as with Google, Friday is a free day for coming up with new ideas, mixing up people working to together and prototyping games live.

To the core

Of course, process itself doesn't make a great game. That comes with the ability to break down new ideas into the smallest nugget of fun possible and then polish it as much as possible.

One way of doing this at Zynga with Friends is using - and hacking up - boardgames, and constantly playing games, with builds distributed wirelessly daily to the staff to play.

"Let your ideas be as grand as possible, but understand your limitations," Thakkar said.

This means you have to be prepared to create a lot of features and cut a lot of features.

"We come up with way too many ideas. But often, even the ideas you throw away affect the game you make."

One example of this was the arguments the team had over whether to ship an AI mode in Words with Friends. It didn't.

"If we had, we would have crippled the game because it would have reduced the number of people playing online," Thakkar revealed.