Archives For agile

The (Bloody Awful) Art of Estimation

September 9, 2014 — Leave a comment

The entire point of Agile is to maintain flexibility in order to deal with the uncertainty inherent in developing software products. To fully display my biases this goes doubly-so for creating videogames as we’re attempting to hit much more nebulous targets like ‘fun’. Planning is still a necessity for most businesses but rigidly sticking to a plan is not. It’s embodied as this value in the Agile manifesto.

Responding to change over following a plan.

If we’re planning we need to be estimating but we know from research that humans are completely bloody awful at it when there are high degrees of uncertainty involved. We cannot see the future and are kidding ourselves if we think we can. In my experience discussions about estimation tend to go in one of two directions. We have the empiricists or Reality Deniers and the #noestimates crowd or the Oblivious Snowflakes. Broadly speaking the first group think numbers have the answer and the second group is in a really unique situation where they don’t really need to do much if any long-term planning for development.

Denial, something, something, something… river in Egypt.

The Reality Deniers take comfort in models and using data from ‘experimentation’ to generate predictions about the future. There are two problems here; context and the applicability of the model chosen. Context is the game development empiricists Achilles heel. If I run three miles several times a week following the same path in sunny LA does the average of my times translate over to how well I’ll run a mountain marathon in really bad weather? No, very obviously not. Newton’s Laws of Motion don’t apply on the really small-scale and the really-big scale but they do work pretty damn well at the scale the experiments to determine them were conducted at. If you want to use experimental data to create models to predict the future you better be damn sure your context is not about to change under your feet. Which, being videogames development it almost assuredly will.

The second problem is the model. As most people use Scrum and Scrum is about tracking velocity almost all future estimates just linearly extrapolate velocity. The problem is not necessarily that this is wrong just that it’s incredibly unlikely to be right. All sorts of things speed-up and slow-down teams and change the way people estimate for an average to be tracking consistently. Further the velocity of a team coming to the end of a project is going to be very different to one starting off. Primarily because the level of certainty and knowledge about the project increases greatly as it nears completion. Small errors in estimation accumulate into big errors over a long period of time and you can’t really be sure that everything has actually been estimated (we’re going to iterate a lot right?). Anyone who has had to write any multiplayer code knows that extrapolating linearly in the presence of even small accelerations is doomed to give you wildly diverging results.

Combine the two together and I don’t think we even need to look at problems with the experiment setup. We want to estimate an uncertain process, with data from a different context using an overly simplistic model, even dressing up in our +10 Robes of Technomancy this seems stupid. Science is rigorous, this approach is not.

#noestimates4lyfe

At the other end of the spectrum is the idea that we don’t need any estimates. I called these guys the Oblivious Snowflakes because their position is often unique and they don’t seem to realise it. I actually have a lot of sympathy for this position as it sounds dreamy and has less of a bad accountancy vibe. #noestimates is the idea of continuously shipping a product taken to the next level. These snowflakes aren’t iterating once a month or once a week they’re iterating once an hour and pushing the results out live. Of course you don’t need to estimate anything if you have already shipped a product and are able to work on it blisteringly fast. Well, in the short-term at least until someone with a tiny bit more vision and urrm… planning comes and knocks your product off it’s perch. Sadly for most of us a system of continuous delivery is a very long way from reality and most games require a lot more effort to create a viable product than a web application.

Reality Check

We’re agile… or at least supposed to be. The answer to this tricky conundrum of what to do with longer-term project planning in the face of a fog of uncertainty is damn well written down.

Individuals and interactions over processes and tools.

Customer collaboration over contract negotiation.

In this instance the customer is not the end-user they are the person paying you to make the game. It could be an investor, the representative of a publisher or your executive producer it doesn’t really matter. What they want is assurance that you’re not full of shit and they’d like this signed, in triplicate, in blood with a firm deadline upfront based on any plan you have. This is a risk mitigation strategy for them and your job is to deftly dodge the contract deadline hammer and convince them to work closely with you on a very regular basis to better mitigate the risks involved in development. However we’ll still need a plan but this is not a plan that can be captured in a contract. It must by necessity be iterated on as development continues and new things are learnt. As we progress towards completing a project our plan will become more certain. It also means that we can early out and still do something else if, despite our best efforts, the project is not meeting expectations. Both parties need to embrace the reality of the uncertainty inherent in the beginning of a project and keep plans vague and the uncertainty in them spelled out clearly.

As the project progresses the plan should be routinely revised and the teams developing the game should be meeting and discussing the game regularly with the customer. At a high level a healthy project should see a downward trend in uncertainty over time. Employing schemes like the development lifecycle can be a good way of tracking progress an deal with uncertainty upfront. In short building the project plan is no different to building the product and the people working on it a virtuous cycle of iteration, feedback and adjustment.

Detailed Estimates Are Still Useful

For teams iteration planning there is nothing better than a old fashioned application of numbers. We want to work at a sustainable pace and the only way to do so is to avoid over-committing to the work we are going to do in an iteration. This is why we should prefer shorter iterations. It’s much easier to estimate and plan one weeks worth of work than it is four weeks and we avoid compound error causing massive deviations in our plan. It’s also much easier to estimate the work we are just about to do because we know a lot more about it than it is to think about the consequences of the consequences of that work in a months time. This is also the point that it makes sense to capture uncertainty in the actual task estimate rather than keeping it as a separate concern. Essentially estimates should be a combination of task size and how sure we are that our size estimate is correct. We then drop tasks into buckets and using recent historical data for the team plus a bit of intuition to bring stories into an iteration such that we don’t over commit to the number of ‘buckets’ we got done before.

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Agile Game Design Documentation

August 20, 2014 — Leave a comment

In most cases it’s essential to do some design work before you can begin implementation. Typically the artifact coming out of this is some form of documentation about the game or feature to be implemented. In traditional games development this usually involves generating a massive tome explaining every facet of the game in detail. This approach is also a massive waste of time for several reasons:

  • It is necessarily incomplete and as such will require revisions as flaws and unexpected problems are found.
  • It is incredibly hard to maintain due to the volume of material and references between elements, even in a wiki system.
  • Being hard to maintain means it gets out of date quickly and loses coherence.
  • No one will read it as they are generally too big, verbose and dense to be used day to day.
  • It’s completely open to interpretation as it’s a description of something rather than a concrete thing itself.

This sort of documentation does have one use. Theatre for managers and publishers. It provides a nice cozy, false sense of security that everything is fixed, known and contains as few risks as possible. Sadly this is usually deleterious to the actual goal of managing project risk.

Why do we design?

To answer the question of “what should agile design docs should look like?” I first need to step back a stage and question why I design things in the first place. The answer I like best is simplicity, the goal of design is to provide the simplest solution that solves a particular set of criteria well. This is not necessarily the most intuitive solution and therefore it is important to spend some time making sure that I understand the problem before we go ahead and implement a solution.

I value simplicity because it usually provides a solution that is conceptually easy to understand for both the people implementing it and the person using the resulting feature. Simple solutions also tend to be robust as they have a low number of moving parts. Simple solutions are easier to modify later to add more complexity if required. Overly complex solutions can be an absolute nightmare to detangle at a later date.

Why do we document design?

If the simplest solution is not necessarily the most intuitive that means I need to be able to communicate the problem, the solution and the reasoning behind selecting the solution to other people. Usually in the case of design documentation that’s to the people implementing it, even if that person is me. It also means it needs to be easily digestible and relevant only to the current context. This is the great failure of monolithic design documentation.

Making an idea easy to question is also a vital part of communication. The creation of a design artifact is emphatically not a hand-off procedure but one part in a continuing collaboration to create a great product.

Agile Documentation

The main measure of progress in Agile is the state of the working product, for games means a playable game. Design artifacts therefore are not a measurable form of progress in themselves. They are however incredibly useful in moving forward more rapidly towards a working implementation. As such design artifacts must be “Just Barely Good Enough” that is they provide enough detail to start implementation with the expectation that design questions will be answered whilst the implementation is in progress. The level of detail entered into and type of design artifact generated really depends very much on the context of what is being designed. However all design artifacts should generally answer three points.

  • What is the Problem Domain?- What problem is it we are trying to solve? What are the goals we want to achieve by solving this problem? Why is this a problem?
  • What is the Current Best Solution? – A description of the solution adhering to the constraint it must be just enough to begin implementation. This could be anything from a photo of a whiteboard sketch through text documents to a mocked up video or animation. All depending on context.
  • Why? – How does the solution meet the goals and sort out the problem we are trying to solve?

We also need to deal with one more issue. Most products including games are broken down into various smaller chunks for implementation and still need documentation about the project in totality to keep things coherent. Particularly in the early concept stages where different avenues are generally being explored. The good news is that this documentation approach is applicable at that level as well. It’s useful to have a simple, easy to digest and question synopsis of exactly what the game is supposed be and how to achieve it. The trick again is to provide just enough documentation to get started and to answer questions as they come up.

Next up how do you go about creating these design artifacts?

In Agile, Game Design, Game Development , , ,
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A Simple Agile Game Design/Development Process

July 2, 2014 — 3 Comments

Usually when Agile is introduced to people it’s done so with Scrum which is seemingly filled with arcane terms and voodoo ritual. Very often the context behind those rituals and terms is lost and the general advice is to, “do it by the book,” until you understand, before you adapt it. There are a couple of problems with this. Firstly that the context Scrum was developed for might not fit the context you are making games in so rather than enabling you to move faster and make better games you are standing in a corner with your wizard hat on. Secondly Scrum as an introduction obscures some of the elegance behind the Agile Principles, concerned as it is with day-to-day process in service to that elegance.

So let’s cut back to the elegance. In yesterdays post I made a simple re-drafting of the Agile Manifesto to make sense of it for games design/development. Today I’m going to take those re-drafted principles and show how they fit into a simple Agile process.

First a diagram:

simple agile

That’s it. That’s the beating heart of Agile. So simple you can describe it in one sentence. Come up with an idea, make it and try it out to see what it’s like, then use your learning to refactor your idea and processes. So simple it gets repeatedly invented in an intuitive fashion. So simple I can retire this blog forever! Done!

Well not quite, we’ve only managed to deal with a few of the Agile Principles in this loop the rest involve what happens during each stage. Currently we’re hitting:

  • Deliver a playable game frequently, from a couple of weeks to a couple of months, with a preference to the shorter timescale.
  • A playable game is the primary measure of progress.
  • At regular intervals, the team reflects on how to become more effective, then tunes and adjusts its behavior accordingly.

Ideate

We want to keep our ideas lightweight. Over-complicating our ideas too early means wasting a bunch of time both coming up with them and also implementing them. We’ll be refining our ideas over the course of many iterations so starting with a ‘perfect design’ is not going to help particularly as we have not yet managed to evaluate how perfect the design really is! The watch phrase some canny individual coined was “Just Barely Good Enough”.

Ideally we’re keeping these principles in mind:

  • Continuous attention to technical excellence and good design enhances agility.
  • Simplicity–the art of maximizing the amount of work not done–is essential.

Create

Creation is in many ways the ‘easy bit’ where we turn the idea into something playable. The main point to be aware of is that almost every task is going to require some Just-In-Time design. Having whiteboards (or a pad if you’re by yourself) handy is incredibly useful to quickly solve design problems. If you’re creating a videogame then this is also the time to make sure you’re refactoring the code your are working on to keep it simple, elegant and easy to work with. There are lots of ways to make this less painful but that’s outside of the scope of this post.

The principles to keep in mind are the same:

  • Continuous attention to technical excellence and good design enhances agility.
  • Simplicity–the art of maximizing the amount of work not done–is essential.

Evaluate

Evaluation means putting real people in front of your game and have them play it. Ideally you want the audience you intend to release the game to playing it as early as possible (or a close facsimile). At the very least you want some people that aren’t you playing the game to give criticism and feedback. Other developers can be good as they can excuse some of the rough edges of a product in development as well as being able to understand the ruleset and provide critique of the design. If you’re in a company then you’re probably going to have a list of stakeholders responsible for your project who should be playing every iteration and providing feedback. Other excellent although more time consuming methods include using Usability testing methods. For example doing some User Testing, a technique where you watch a players game session and take notes on friction points in the experience.

Schemes like alpha and beta testing, attending games shows, plus funding methods like Early Access also provide a host of willing playtesters. A caveat here is that the quality of the game experience does matter when showing something externally to large groups of people in a manner where there are quality expectations. First impressions count, word of mouth is important and it can be hard to dig a games name out of the toilet if every comment on articles about your game references how rubbish an early version was.

The end result should be a collated list of feedback and some action points to take into the next Ideation phase.

The principles being hit here are:

  • Our highest priority is to satisfy the customer through early and continuous delivery of a quality game experience.
  • Welcome changing requirements, even late in development. Agile processes harness change for the customer’s competitive advantage.

The remainder of the principles deal with things like team composition, team management and day-to-day practices that are effective rather than process. They should be kept in mind at all times.

So why is Scrum so complicated?

Well it turns out as you start to use the above process a whole bunch of questions will routinely come up that need to be answered. Some can be answered by reading the Agile principles but others need a bit of cogitating on the best way to handle them.

For example how long should it take to move through the whole loop? According to the Agile Principles:

Deliver a playable game frequently, from a couple of weeks to a couple of months, with a preference to the shorter timescale. Frequently providing a playable game means frequent feedback from stakeholders, playtesters and colleagues. It is the engine of iteration.

So we want to move through the loop pretty quickly, what if our idea is complicated? Well we’re going to have to cut the idea up into chunks we can implement and we’re going to need to work out roughly what order to do them in. But that means we won’t have the “full game” playable for some time? Well we should build a prototype first so we can get early feedback on our complete game design or we won’t worry too much and let the final design fall out in the wash as we receive feedback. Scrum basically provides a ready made solution to a lot of common problems that come up when trying to implement this elegant feedback loop.

Whether you pick an off-the-shelf solution or grow your own from simple beginnings the important thing to remember is that the entire process fails if you don’t keep up the virtuous feedback loop for both the game being made and the processes you use to make it.

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The Agile Principles of Game Design/Development

July 1, 2014 — 3 Comments

Let’s face it the Agile Manifesto is very Software Engineer focused. I’m not sure it’s meant to be but it’s a consequence of the background of the people that wrote it. The principles also explain what but not really why or how the principles directly interact with the manifesto values. It’s also a bit hard to frame in your own context sometimes. This is a bit of an experiment in re-drafting the principles to make sense for game design/development. I’ll highlight the changes I make in bold. The original Agile Manifesto which can be found here.

First the values themselves:

We are uncovering better ways of developing games by doing it and helping others do it.
Through this work we have come to value:

Individuals and interactions over processes and tools
Playable games over comprehensive documentation
Customer collaboration over contract negotiation
Responding to change over following a plan

That is, while there is value in the items on the right, we value the items on the left more.

The first thing to read is the very last sentence. Lots of people read the manifesto and assume that there should be no process and no documentation. The point of the manifesto is that those things are necessary to a degree but should not be the focus as they have a tendency to take over and work against the primary goal of making a particular product.

Why a playable game rather than comprehensive documentation? What about the Design Treatment, the Preliminary Design, the Final Design and all the other ancillary documentation you might produce? The simple fact is that the value of an idea for a game is much better expressed as a game that you can play rather than abstracted into a document. A document is open to interpretation in a manner that an actual demonstrable game isn’t which means that two people can have wildly different ideas about how the end product might turn out without either of them actually being wrong. A design expressed as documentation and a tangible, playable product is there to be critiqued much more directly with far less ambiguity. Further generating comprehensive documentation rather than a product is a big waste of time as we know that we will be making changes as we go along and a big list of things to implement before the game is ‘finished’ often delays critical iteration.

I re-phrased the Agile Principles as:

We follow these principles:

  1. Our highest priority is to satisfy the customer through early and continuous delivery of a quality game experience. This provides us with the best and most direct feedback so as to shape out product direction. It also means our game is continuously in a shippable state. The value of a game is captured in the quality of the experience.
  2. Welcome changing requirements, even late in development. Agile processes harness change for the customer’s competitive advantage. Late changes are a reality of the business.
  3. Deliver a playable game frequently, from a couple of weeks to a couple of months, with a preference to the shorter timescale. Frequently providing a playable game means frequent feedback from stakeholders, playtesters and colleagues. It is the engine of iteration.
  4. Business people and developers must work together daily throughout the project.
  5. Build projects around motivated individuals. Give them the environment and support they need, and trust them to get the job done. Autonomy, mastery and purpose are the key motivators.
  6. The most efficient and effective method of conveying information to and within a development team is face-to-face conversation.
  7. A playable game is the primary measure of progress. We are making a game, if the game is not changing we are not working on it. A feature designed on paper is not a feature that is playable.
  8. Agile processes promote sustainable development. The sponsors, developers, and users should be able to maintain a constant pace indefinitely.
  9. Continuous attention to technical excellence and good design enhances agility.
  10. Simplicity–the art of maximizing the amount of work not done–is essential.
  11. The best architectures, requirements, and designs emerge from self-organizing teams.
  12. At regular intervals, the team reflects on how to become more effective, then tunes and adjusts its behavior accordingly.

The principles were not originally numbered but I’ve done so to keep the discussion brief, it’s not a statement on which of the principles are more important than the others. Never the less there are a few of the principles that are good to call out in groups.

  • Process Improvement: Twelve represents the engine of process improvement within the agile framework, it’s taking an iterative and evidence based approach to improving the working practices of a team with the rest of the principles representing the yardstick by which to measure them.
  • Game Improvement: Seven details the key indicator of progress. The state of the game itself. Combined with Three and One it provides the engine for evaluating and iterating on the game.
  • The Team: Five and Eleven detail who the team is and how they should be managed.
  • Mindset: Eight, Nine and Ten frame the mindset required to work with an agile process with One as the goal.
  • Working Practices: Two, Four and Six detail important working practices that are part of the reality of working on commercial products with many people.

The entire point of the Agile Manifesto is to define a new way of working that is customer focused, iterative and concentrates on making the best product possible by empowering the people that make it. Hopefully this re-write clarifies how this approach fits game design/development and gives people a good starting point for defining their own processes.

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Go Wide, But Love Constraints!

April 16, 2014 — Leave a comment

Concepting and prototyping allows developers to cheaply explore a design space in order to find the nuggets of gameplay that can be polished to a high sheen. The single biggest issues are the size of this design space and the efficiency with which you can explore it. Roughly speaking we want to explore as much of the design space as possible as quickly as possible. There are two good routes to this; defining good constraints and working in parallel.

Good Constraints

Limiting the size of the design space is something you want to do for a whole variety of reasons:

  • To match company vision and goals.
  • To tackle specific problems.
  • To meet the abilities of the staff you have.

The single most important reason for defining clear constraints is to aid creativity. It’s simply easier to think through choices when they are limited. Constraints don’t need to be externally imposed nor do they need to be shared between teams working on new concepts. They do however, need to be good constraints. So what is a good constraint at this stage in the production lifecycle? It’s a constraint that can act as a quick razor to dismiss ideas. For example:

  • Genre.
  • Functionality requirements.
  • Team size and experience.

Bad constraints are not invalid constraints but ones that are more complex questions where the answers are unclear this early in the project. A good example would be setting a deadline, for example this product must ship within 18 months. There is almost certainly a constraint on the amount of time a project can take to make it to market in a business but estimates of this at an early stage in a project are going to be completely wrong. People deal with unpredictable things that need to fit into a fixed timescale by being extremely conservative, which is probably not something you want at this stage in a project where there should be maximum creative scope.

Go Wide

It’s a truism that it’s quicker to explore a space by splitting up and taking different sections. Double Fine’s Amnesia Fortnight is a good example of how this might work in practice within a small/medium sized company. Likewise Vlambeer  demonstrate that even as a tiny studio by severely limiting the amount of time you spend on a prototype you can hit many different ideas including some that become successes. In an ideal reality concepts should be something that are being developed all the time. Who doesn’t have a book of design ideas juggling around in their head or transferred to paper? Creating a prototype is more time consuming but critically allows a better understanding of how well the proposed idea meets the constraints and how feasible it is for a given team to develop. The more prototypes you can create the better you have explored the space and the more likely you’ll have come across the true maxima in that space. For larger companies it makes sense to have many small teams prototyping at once and as one or more ideas become more concretely ‘the best’ begin to structure those teams around moving them into pre-production. Sadly what you’ll mostly see are a lot of companies that have one small team working on one particular idea without really bothering to more fully explore the design space. This usually results in companies paying lip service to the production lifecycle without really buying into it because there are no real alternatives to the one project in flight.

Ideally what a developer is looking for is for the lifecycle stages to act as a funnel. As the stages are progressed you gain more information about how well the idea meets the constraints and the teams ability to implement it. So as you move through the stages ideas are discarded as they are found wanting.

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The Game Development Lifecycle

March 15, 2014 — 2 Comments

In this post I’m going to continue setting up some ground work to talk about Agile and Games Development by discussing the Game Development Lifecycle. A lifecycle in this context is the identifiable stages of production a project moves through from initial conception through to shipping (or going live in the case of services). I think the games lifecycle is pretty much divorced from the project management methodology you follow. There are simply several stages a game goes through whether they are explicit recognised or not. Much of what I write below is idealised in order to illustrate what I think the stages are and what happens in them. I’ve also deliberately ignored stuff like marketing as I’m no expert and it’s something so dependent on the chosen business model.

Here we have the lifecycle:

gamedevlifecycle

A couple of initial things to note off the bat. Firstly there is no scale to this diagram it ultimately captures the process in a fractal manner. As you decompose a game you still need to go through all of these steps for each component of the design. For example if you are adding a new feature to an existing game you still need to work out if it’s a good idea or not so prototyping is only sensible. The second thing to note is that the transitions and where exactly a game is might not be clear in any particular organisation. Some organisations are very formal, have very specific hand-offs and might even abandon work (but keep the game artifacts made). Others, particularly in smaller teams can be very fluid and the move from prototype to shipped product is a series of refactorings of the game. In my opinion almost all games go through these lifecycle stages and quite a lot of project cock ups come from not respecting the limitations of each stage. For example if a project goes through a sudden large pivot in development during some of the latter stages then it’s behooves people to recognize that they will need to drop back in the game development lifecycle for substantial portions of the game to prove it out again.

Moving from left to right through the stages in the diagram should lead to a firming up of the game ideas. It’s an oft said thing that the initial game concept bears only a passing resemblance to the final game and that’s because ideas are just the starting point. Ideas need to be tested and refined, preferably in the crucible of real player experience. This is one reason why putting a massive amount of time into a monolithic design document before anyone starts making anything is a terrible idea. Moving through the lifecycle stages should also firm up knowledge about when the game will be shippable and the scope of work remaining. For a lot of projects this doesn’t happen though and I think a decent Agile approach that takes some ideas from Lean would help approach the lifecycle stages with the right mindset.

Idea

The cornerstone of any project but also the least important part. Ideas are ten-a-penny and it’s the ability to take that idea and build something good from it that is hard. Sometimes the team you have might not be a good fit for making a particular idea or the resources required are unrealistic for what you want to achieve or there is no real market for your idea. There are lots of reasons not to pursue an idea but at this stage many benefit from a little making to gain a better understanding of what might be involved. I’m a firm believer that there is a lot of value in a failed idea and even more value in having a whole bunch of ideas you like in existence as prototypes. Ideas should be given a quick sanity check before moving onto the next stage without getting too involved in details that will likely change further on in the lifecycle anyway.

Prototyping

Lets make a game! In game development it’s the job of a prototype to take the core game ideas and demonstrate that the team is capable of turning them into something fun. This is necessarily messy and exploratory. It’s also an ideal time to stop spending more money on an idea if it seems to be going nowhere. I’ve written at more length on the value of prototyping to both individuals and businesses as well as having spoken about my own experiences. The end result should be an entry in your prototype repository and a decision about whether or not the prototype was deemed a success. Prototypes are also very useful for securing funding to take the game into pre-production as well as validating your game idea by letting real people get their hands on it.

Pre-Production

Pre-Production begins when you take a prototype and decide to make it into a complete game. It’s the process of taking the core game ideas, refactoring them and expanding on them to create a meatier game with the view to nailing down most of the game systems and features. As this progresses the underlying technology is generally refactored as well, to make it technically better and suited to the creation of the large amounts of content many games need. The goal of pre-production is typically to end up in a position where the majority of the work remaining is content creation without large changes to game features. Usually this culminates in a ‘vertical slice’ of the game containing every aspect demonstrated at production quality in a ‘one level’ run through. Making a ‘vertical slice’ also exposes the weaknesses in the technology and content creation pipelines that need to be fixed before the game should be put into production. There should be further validation of the game with lots of real people all the way through this process as the game changes and by this point you should have a good idea of the quality of game you are going to put out.

Production

Production is the point where you get hard to work at cranking out game content which is often the most time consuming part. At this point it can get incredibly expensive to make relatively innocuous seeming changes to the game design. For example altering the attributes that define how a character jumps at a late stage might mean you need to rework all the content in your game. Ouch! Ideally people not concentrating on making content or supporting content creators will be fixing defects, optimizing the game, improving the user experience or ‘juicing it‘. Hopefully it goes without saying that you should be putting all this new content in front of real people all the time to validate that it’s fun and works well with the game pacing (e.g. everyone fails then gives up on stage 3, maybe we should fix that).

Polish

Polishing is the final step that takes a game from being good to great. It’s adding more ‘juice’, improving the user experience, making sure the game pacing is great using feedback gained from playtesting with real people, squashing as many defects as possible and making sure the game runs smoothly on all targeted platforms. A lot of the time this runs in sync with production as some content is often finished before other parts. Although a bit of time at the end of a project dedicated to making the game much more polished can make all the difference. A word of warning though. Games never feel finished to the people working on them. At some point you just have to stop and put it out into the world.

Ship

Champagne or shame this is where the rubber hits the road and your game either crashes and burns or achieves some reasonable commercial success. It’s also the hardest point to reach for all sorts of reasons so it’s quite an achievement to be part of a team to ship something even if it’s not a commercial success.

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It’s fantastic to have a game where everyone on the team is involved with multiple aspects of the game; we’re already a team of generalists, with designer-artists and programmer-designers and the like, but the small team fosters an environment where everyone gets intrinsically involved in everyone else’s business, and I think it made for a better game.

Q&A: Hearthstone‘s small-team success at big-time Blizzard

Eric Dodds on Hearthstone Development

Posted on March 10, 2014 In Agile, Game Development, Great Quotes , , ,
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On the Prevelance of Scrumbut in Game Teams

March 1, 2014 — 2 Comments

“Yeah, we’re doing Scrum but…”

Speak to nearly anyone in the games industry about their Agile implementation and this is what will come out of their mouths. It’s also a prevalent issue in Scrum adoption in other software creation industries. Leading to the term ‘Scrumbut’ being coined. It seems to signify, particularly in the long-term that a company has chosen to adopt Scrum, usually because they think it will fix some problem in the development process but has hit snags fitting their existing process into Scrum so they end up adapting the methodology they want to use rather than the process they want to fix. Then typically a project fails, the process is never fixed so the same problem rears its head and tears are shed. The collective take away often seems to be that Scrum didn’t work because it didn’t fix the problems. In reality it was the company or project that failed because they didn’t fix their own problems and saw/were sold Scrum as a magic bullet.

That said for any existing company and project there has to be a transition period between the previous way of working and the full adoption of a newly chosen Agile methodology. Many of the technical parts of Agile methodologies have a non-trivial amount of work to implement. For example setting up a continuous integration process and the suite of automated regression tests it runs. Further you can’t just bodge an existing set of processes into Agile methodology de jour and expect good results. Agile implementation is as much a reworking of culture as it is process. Any good Agilista will tell you we should be favoring people and interactions over processes and tools and the change in a companies working culture is probably the biggest impediment to changing process. In my experience this culture shift can’t just be a top down endeavour or a bottom up ‘revolution’ but something that is embraced at all levels and given adequate nurturing. This shift is ultimately about trust. Executives must be willing to let go of a strong command and control structure and developers ready to be open and honest about any problems they face so they can be addressed in a timely manner. The cultural shift to Agile also needs to extend to external partners/customers as working relationships will almost certainly need to change. For example you need a much more collaborative working relationship with your customer (but you know that it’s a tenant of Agile!) which for a lot of game developers means working closely with a publisher, a working relationship that doesn’t exactly have a reputation for trust in either direction! Everyone needs to have at least understood the Agile principles and what that means for their working relationship.

Some of this can result in some odd Catch-22s.

“We want to release more often but we don’t have confidence in the build, so we want to setup continuous integration, but we don’t have any regression tests, but we’re too busy working to ship the build to write them.”

Worse still there don’t appear to be ready, easy answers for how to transition any particular company or culture to any particular Agile methodology nor are there many/any games companies talking about how successful they have been. At best the advice seems to be ‘use this to fix your problems don’t expect them to magically disappear’.

In games the default methodology adopted appears to be Scrum which for a lot of reasons does not appear ideal to me for the totality of the lifecycle of a game. Games have distinct phases in their lifecycle, we don’t typically build out all the levels when the core gameplay is still being worked on extensively because it’s wasteful and we can look to Lean manufacturing to see some good discussion about why this is. Further some bits of game development like content creation which are much, much larger than in other software projects don’t really fit into the Scrum model. Games are very often boxed products or built as such and not sold as services so there needs to be a planning phase, however short and high level in order to set a clear vision, goals and build an initial product backlog. There are lots of fiddles like Sprint 0 added to Scrum to try to cope with these problems but to my mind Scrum needs to sit within a larger framework. Further Scrum doesn’t seem to scale very well beyond small teams and games projects are often huge in comparison to the ‘Scrum sweetspot’.

The really good news is that games development isn’t a unique snowflake in finding Scrum a bit lacking. In fact looking at data from the likes of the Ambysoft Surveys it’s easy to see that large teams in general are finding Agile adoption hard and that a lot of the barriers are very similar to the ones mentioned above. There are lots of other methodologies out there like Disciplined Agile Delivery that although not targeted towards quite the same projects as games try to deal with the larger complexity and team sizes found in enterprise IT projects. Whilst I don’t think they show the way out for games projects interested in Agile they definitely show the direction we should be looking towards.

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My Experience of Agile in Games Development

February 24, 2014 — 2 Comments

As a software developer I’ve always had an affinity for the Agile Manifesto. However as someone who has spent their professional life creating games products I know that the environment stymies many of the bigger principles involved. The purpose of this post is really to state my experience before I try to go on and talk further about Agile so those words can be set in context.

Previous jobs and other group projects had no or ad-hoc project management but my introduction to Agile “in practice” was actually intuitive. It occurred whilst I was working at Realtime Worlds and had finished APB and there was suddenly a decision vacuum from our project leaders about what exactly we should be working on next. Previous suggestions were in the vein of “go wide” with game districts themed around things like a zombie apocalypse or a “no-rules” districts (which was awesome fun). The state of the project was such that many of us were deeply unhappy with the core game prior to shipping but could do nothing about it because we were in heavy bug-fix and polish mode. The project was organised in classic functional silos myself on a Gameplay Programming team with other silos representing special engineering interests and disciplines. A core group of us spread across these teams really wanted to tighten up and juice the core experience. In the decision vacuum I pitched an idea to organise a cross-functional team working iteratively to improve the core game experience. We had a set of really good ideas formed from feedback about where the main pain points were and how to tackle them. We knew we wanted to move quickly but not too far with each iteration so we avoided unnecessary work. We also knew we needed to work closely in a collaborative relationship between developers. In short we accidentally formed our own ‘agile’ team. Sadly Realtime Worlds died soon after we released our first iteration so we didn’t learn some of the lessons about project management I’ve since come to appreciate but the core of what made us successful was the core of what makes Agile tick day to day for developers. Caring about the customer, creating something simple in a cross-functional team, tight collaboration and improving on things in an iterative fashion. The work we started was continued by GamersFirst who transformed APB into APB: Reloaded a pretty successful F2P shooter.

After Realtime went bust I moved to CCP Games to work on EVE Online. EVE itself a marvelously interesting product but I was also drawn to CCP because they used Scrum and were organised in a way that I thought was closely aligned to how I wanted to work. After three years here working in myriad teams on myriad things I can state that it’s reasonably true, we may still be doing Scrumbut however people are at least receptive to working improvements and the EVE project is pushing towards different way of working and has come far. One of the nice things we have is a fortnightly Agile Community of Practice which is not a cabal of senior managers deciding working practices from on high but a collection of interested developers from the project discussing Agile and how we can improve our working practices. This has lead to some interesting developments in working practices with some teams now running on one week sprint cadences (after their Scrum master gave a great evidence filled presentation on why they should), the questioning of our own general working practices, release practices and such like. Last week I chaired a discussion where we took each Agile principle and looked at our how well we as a project meet it. It was illuminating not only because different perspectives on our situation were shared but because it made me question some of the validity of the Agile principles (or at least their wording) to game development. Working here has definitely shown me is that Scrum is probably not the answer (but it might be part of it) to large scale projects for a whole load of reasons. Both topics for future posts.

An amazing amount of Agile literature and methodologies have been generated by the general IT community but very little has been game specific. Over the course of this blog I’d like to try to put together my own thoughts on the subject into something a bit more organised that goes beyond the usual siren call to “adopt it and see magic happen”. A colleague Rob Galanakis is already blogging about this sort of thing and is part inspiration for restarting a blogging effort.

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A talk I gave at Unite Nordic in 2013.

Basically an exposition of my thoughts on prototyping, how to do it right and what value it provides to game developers.

Posted on February 21, 2014 In Game Development, Prototyping , , , , , , , ,
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