When you are building a product – ANY product – there are a few items that are not negotiable:
On time – there’s always going to be a deadline – even if it is self imposed. Projects without deadlines always end up falling victim to other priorities – getting continually push down the to-do list until they are irrelevant.
On budget – there no such thing as a free lunch. Cost is a key component for any thinking company, and hitting a budget requires discipline and creativity.
Complete – is everything that was laid out in the spec (you do have a spec, don’t you?) completed? Getting things done on time and on budget aren’t going to do much good if you didn’t achieve your goals.
So this is the full list for every project, right? Make sure those three things are done, and you’ll be a success and everyone will be happy. Right?
Yes. As long as you aren’t talking about something that is supposed to be FUN.
Fun is a very nebulous, elusive term. Everyone knows what it is for the most part (some people find bungee jumping fun, but I’m not one of them), but sometimes it can be hard to describe. If you are building a game (or anything for kids, really), if MUST be fun. No fun – no product. So how do you build that into the process while still hitting the key points above.
It’s called creative cycles. We all understand that there is a point in time at which you are going to have a “playable” game. The first step is to be sure that is built into the schedule. If you wait until the thing is done before you start deciding if it is any fun, you’ve already lost. You need MORE THAN ONE pass at making sure a game PLAYS well, before you start to refine it for details like appropriate sounds, or voices, or interfaces, etc, etc.
The second step is understanding how to iterate. The key here is brutal honesty. If you think a game is “neat” or “interesting”, you need to seriously rethink it. It needs to be FUN. As in “I played it for an hour straight last night”, or “I had to yank it out of my kid’s hands this weekend”. Now is not the time to be tactful. People need to develop thick skin, and leave the defensiveness at home. Now is the time to create a GREAT product, not an OK product.
Once you have that, you can go through loops that look something like this:
Deploy test version
Allow exactly ONE DAY for testing and feedback
Compile all feedback into a single document for review
Meet to discuss all points. (If this meeting takes more than 2 hours, what you have built is likely garbage)
Make changes as required
Repeat
How many times do you iterate? Relax – it’s not “As many times as necessary”. Twice should be plenty, thrice is the absolute maximum. Any feedback coming in after that is from people who weren’t paying attention in the first place. Exclude them from the process in the future.
It’s clean, it’s tight, and it’s focused on your goals. Follow this plan, and you can’t fail.
Assuming you have good artists, that is…. 