How To Fix Everything!

Jehan :Geldonyetich needs to Get. A. Life.

He has one; he’s a gaming pundit

UnsGub :
“What you invariably end up with is an endless development cycle, continue to refine and improve.”
You say that like it is bad. Endless development cycle means a product is successful with version 1, 2, 3, etc and a good feedback loop addressing your customers needs. Refining and improving is what building solutions is all about. The problem that occurs for some is that progress is measured in years or months while others do it in weeks, days, hours.

The reason it’s bad is that you need a ‘point’ at which you release the product and the ‘refining and improving’ is done through the program management of patches and expansions.

You’ll never get to that ‘point’ if you don’t have a clear set of achievable goals for that release. That’s why scope control is important.

As someone posted WAY back, it’s all Project Management 101. The whole purpose of which is to mitigate risk and manage to a budget/timeline.

Believe it or not, the cheapest part in designing any project are the ideas. It costs you very little to ‘think stuff up’ but it costs you dearly to start implementing those ideas. So ‘thinking stuff up’ along the way is a necessary evil and one that you need to plan for by gaining feedback early.

Geldonyetich needs to Get. A. Life.

1-3 posts a day is not that indicative of needing to get a life. If you don’t like the frequency of my posts, here’s a thought: post more.

@Geldon

And then there’s the third approach, famously epitomized by William Goldman: Nobody knows anything. Every decision is a crapshoot that could either work or fail, based on little more than chance. You can’t derive a clear lesson from it, because it could fail to apply in your case, even if you followed the most prudent course, and it would be difficult to see why.

In a nutshell: We’re all groping in the dark, whether we want to admit it or not.

[checks watch] Well, it’s been a few hours…

Vetarnias
In a nutshell: We’re all groping in the dark, whether we want to admit it or not.

Existentialism. Plato’s cave walls. I love it! I do more than grope in the dark, I relish it.

As pertains to game design in this age, that’s uncomfortably closer to the truth than many of us would like to admit. There’s no hard and fast rules to producing awesome. If there was, the diamonds to rough ratio would be a whole lot better.

sid67
You misunderstand. Project management is about planning, true, but that doesn’t mean you believe that all things can be designed in foresight.

Quite the opposite really. That’s why a good project plan includes a risk mitigation strategy.

This is a good method to operate on. But, as pertains to game development, it’s not good enough.

Go back to our original point of contention, you’re saying that you can’t believe that people in this field (game development) seem to have such a hard time with scope, and my answer is that the scope is harder in this field than others.

It’s not that you’re wrong, it’s a difference of severity. If you’re developing a spreadsheet program, you will encounter setbacks – such as usability issues – but they’re a lot easier to deal with than a game.

Let me use an analogy to explain why (and accept the ease of misinterpretation that would go with such an approach). Basically, creating a game is like creating a joke.

In your head, the joke might sound great. You go through all the effort of evaluating your audience, framing the words of that joke right, perfecting your delivery the delivery, ect.

Then comes the moment you decide to tell the joke. How well you told it is a major factor. So also is the mood of the audience at the specific time you told the joke – maybe they’ve heard too many similar jokes lately, or simply aren’t in the mood for that kind of joke.

You won’t know until it’s time to tell your joke just how well it was received. If it’s a complete dud, you’re essentially forced to go completely back to the drawing board. Even if it goes well, you may decide you can tell and even better joke if you tweak it a little more.

However, no amount of risk management can guarantee anyone will ever laugh.

Do comedians tell their jokes for the first time on an HBO special or do they test and refine the jokes over time in small comedy clubs? Even the most successful stand-ups (like Sienfeld) use the comedy clubs to hone their material.

Risk management isn’t about making people laugh, it’s about controlling the risk that they WON’T laugh. And KNOWING in advance whether the joke is funny before stepping onto the big stage is pretty damn important. At the very least, if it’s not funny — you’ll know you need a different joke.