Project-Management

Today is the day! We finally announced my next game: Casey’s Contraptions. This is a bit of a different project than some of my past ones. This one is a collaboration with Miguel Ángel Friginal from Mystery Coconut. I’m doing the programming, Miguel is doing all the art, and we’re both contributing equally to the design and everything else. It has been great having some awesome art to go with the game, but also to collaborate with someone really closely on the game. ...

I’ve been making computer games in some form or another for just over 25 years now. At the very beginning, as a hobby (passion) and completely by myself (although not for lack of trying to get some of my friends involved). In the late 90s, when I finally left academia and started making games professionally, teams were still relatively small, with a total of around 10-15 people per team. As we all know, budgets and scopes kept growing, and so did team sizes. At its peak, the largest team I worked at had around 200 people. That’s when I decided to go indie and started Power of Two Games, which was obviously just two of us. Finally, now as Snappy Touch, I’ve gone full circle: It’s just me again. ...

You’d think that things would slow down around Christmas time over here. And that I would have lots of time to catch up and write about all the things I keep jotting down in my overflowing “to write” list. Right? Unfortunately that’s not the case. I do want to catch up and share my iPhone development experience with everybody, but it’s hard to make time, even during the holidays. To make things worse, I have a pretty hard deadline I set myself to have my iPhone app ready by early February. ...

High Moon Studios is an unusual company in the games industry. We’re applying agile methodologies for all of our development. My team in particular is using both Scrum (an agile management methodology) and Extreme Programming (an agile engineering methodology). And yes, that means we’re doing pair programming, test-driven development, and all the other often controversial practices. I expect that in a few years, these practices will be a lot more common than they are today. ...

Pair programming really needs to be experienced to be fully appreciated. Just a few years ago, I loved my single office and I was completely against the idea of spending all my time programming with somebody else sitting at the same computer. Today I advocated using pair programming at work and I gladly gave up my office to work in a pair-programming lab alongside the whole team. Funny how things change. ...

Exactly a year ago today, I put up the first article on Games from Within. It was a review of Tom DeMarco’s book Slack. I thought it would make for a nice, symmetrical bookend to wrap the year up with a review for another book by DeMarco: Waltzing with Bears. As the subtitle indicates, Waltzing with Bears deals with managing risk in software development projects. Managing risk, not reducing risk, or removing risk. Do you think that low risk or even no risk is a good thing? Think again. One of the central points of the book is that a project with no risk is not worth doing. Yes, you read that correctly. Intrigued? Go and read the book right now. ...

“Wanted: Young, skinny, wirey fellows not over 18. Must be expert riders willing to risk death daily. Orphans preferred. Wages $25 per week.” Pony Express advertisement, 1860. That would be a funny anachronism if it weren’t still so true. OK, so game companies are not asking potential candidates to risk death every day, but they surely are asking them to give up their lives to the company. ...

This article has been a long time coming. It should be abundantly clear from past articles I’ve written (and from my rants if you know me in person) that I feel very strongly about quality of life issues in the games industry. It pains me to see rampant overtime be commonplace, and the truly ironic part is, I’m convinced it doesn’t help the final game any. As a matter of fact, it probably makes people be less productive and makes the game suffer for it. Ah, but they crunched some impressive hours. They have something they can feel proud of. ...

No plan survives first contact with the enemy. In game development, detailed milestones, complex schedules, and careful planning often go out the window as soon as the project starts. Agile development provides a set of techniques to steer the project in the right direction and embrace change. Is your game not shaping up to be as fun as you thought? Has a game come out with features that you must match to remain competitive? Has your code degenerated into an unmanageable mess? ...

Yeee-haaa! Get your compiler and debugger ready and saddle up, pardner. We got some codin’ to do. ...

When starting a project, it is always a good idea to reflect very critically on your past projects. Think about what went right, and especially what could have been done better, and come up with a plan of attack for the new project. That’s the idea behind project postmortems. To adapt the popular saying, companies that do not conduct some form of postmortem are doomed to repeat the same mistakes. ...

The sun is shining, the air is warm, leaves are finally coming out. Spring is here. Time to put on my rose-colored glasses and do some armchair quarterbacking. I often find myself saying “If I owned a game company I would make sure to do such and such,” so here we go. ...

Here’s a book I wish every manager would read, especially the managers in charge of my project (pure self-interest in my part, I admit it). It’s short, focused, to the point, and it drives home a very powerful message: By being constantly busy working you’re probably hurting your project and your company. ...