Game Production Blog

Chapter 7 is about planning for a video game project. One of the core ideas I took away from this one was the description near the start of the chapter about how a PS2 launch title project was estimated to be bigger than it actually could be. It was difficult to predict how many cities would be playable in the game from the start of the project, with an initially planned 6 being reduced to 3 and then 2. Agile could have simplified this process to make the scope easier to understand. Chapter 8 is about teams. Particularly, I found the talk about leadership to be interesting. Having massive teams of 100 or more people lead to the creation of hierarchies in order to keep these teams from becoming a chaotic mess. Hierarchies work on a purely surface level, but they make communication much more difficult as a result as leaders in the hierarchies are the only ones who can communicate with each other effective. Agile would do away with structures like these. Chapter 9 is about iterations....

There's not much to say about this one since I was mainly working on the pitch video. I encountered an error when uploading videos to Adobe Sparks consistently and I don't know what went wrong, so I'm not as satisfied with it as I feel like I could be. I tried researching what the problem is for a good amount of time and came up with no results. I really don't know what the issue is. I did record the line multiple times until I was satisfied with them. I found Adobe Sparks's slide system was very helpful in this regard. It allowed me to easily break up my script into individual parts in which I could clearly record my voice in 10-12 second bursts, meaning I could easily re-record individual lines rather than having to re-record the entire script at once. The lack of video upload, however, meant that I tried looking into other programs to use, and for those I tried recording the entire script at once which took a lot longer. I inevitably went back to Adobe Sparks a...

Chapter 14 is about the myths associated with agile project management. One that stood out to me in particular is that "Change is Bad", which is often taken on by studios that already have processes that work. This reminds me some of how the studio Rare once mentioned that they hired new employees who had no experience so that fresh ideas could always be brought to the plate to avoid stagnation. Another point that stood out is that not every person believes that Scrum works for them, and may leave due to this style being forced upon them, although some studios may choose to give them specific roles that do not involve Scrum. Chatper 15 is about working with a publisher. The chapter starts off with an example of how Nintendo handled new game ideas in the 90's, in which they'd search for fun first and would tell their outside company to scrap a project if the game they were currently making wasn't fun. This is definitely an agile form of development, focusing only...