What Went Wrong? A Survey of Problems in Game Development Good Practices in Game Development. Is The Game Industry That Bad?

1. What Went Wrong?
A Survey of Problems in Game Development
Good Practices in Game Development
Is The Game Industry That Bad?
Francisco Trindade
TW London Geek Night
21st Nov 2008
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2. Agenda
• Why?
• What?
• How?
• Results
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3. Why?
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4. What?
• Survey of problems found in game development
– Compare to the “traditional” industry
• Good practices in game development
– Is Agile a good fit?
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5. How?
Read Analyzed Compared with
traditional
Postmortems Data industry
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6. Postmortems
• Summarize project experience
– Emphasys on positive and negative aspects
“The most severe blow suffered by all teams was
from accepting an unrealistic schedule. Despite
endemic problems, . . . the concept that was
floated at the time was that it would be possible to
adhere to the original schedule if everyone simply
worked around the clock.
Foolish and naıve, we bought it, and started
pushing.”
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7. Problems Occurrence
Over Budget
Great Number of Defects
Test Problems
Communication Problems
Crunch Time
Delay or Optimistic Schedule
Design Problems
Cutting Features
Feature Creep
Unreal or Ambitious Scope
0% 10% 20% 30% 40% 50% 60% 70% 80%
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8. So...
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9. Is Agile a Good
Fit?
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10. Best Practices
Iterative Process
Quality Control
Agile Modeling
Good Programming Practices
Simple Tools
Product Focus
Creativity
Qualified Team
0% 20% 40% 60% 80% 100%
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11. Conclusion
• Game industry has the same problems as
traditional software industry
• Agile is a good fit
– Probably more than in the traditional industry
• Teamwork, Motivation, Cross-functional teams
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12. Thank you!
Questions?
ftrindad@thoughtworks.com franktrindade.com
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