From Bejeweled to Candy Crush: Finding the key to match-3. The match-3 puzzle game market is a cluttered space.
Typing "match-3" into the iTunes App Store yields more than 2,200 search results. PopCap's Bejeweled sits at the top of the list alongside similar-looking titles that share similar names. Features - A Producer's 10 Lessons Learned the Hard Way. [Experienced Sony Computer Entertainment Europe producer David Manuel shares the secrets he's learned from years of seeing developers fail to learn from the mistakes they've made on projects in the past, and offers suggestions on the key learnings to integrate into your production process.]
Last year, in Brisbane, Australia, where I used to live, there were the worst floods for over 30 years. Features - Producers Of The Roundtable: Getting Coders and Artists to Communicate. [Gamasutra is partnering with GameProducer.net, a game production resource, for a series of Q&As named 'Producers of the Round Table'.
The Round Table is a place for producers who work in game industry to present their opinions in response to questions, and the first article in the series dealt with 'practical scheduling for games'. In this installment, which deals with programmer and artist communication, participants include Peter O'Brien, Producer at Bizarre Creations, Ben Gunstone, Production Director at Stainless Games, Harvard Bonin, Senior Producer last at Electronic Arts, Frank Rogan, Producer at Gas Powered Games and Amer Ajami, Producer at EALA.]
How do you get coders and artists to speak the same language? Peter O'Brien: Get them in the same room and start a dialogue. Features - A Complex Journey: Ninja Theory's Enslaved. Cambridge studio Ninja Theory made a splash early on in the PlayStation 3's lifespan with Heavenly Sword, a game published by Sony that blended melee combat and surprisingly deep characterization.
With its next game -- the first since that title -- the studio co-founder and chief designer Tameem Antoniades hopes to amp up the drama, which he sees as integral to the game as its core gameplay. To this end, he's brought in Alex Garland, writer of the tense zombie flick 28 Days Later. Here Antoniades discusses the process integrating the writer with the game team, as well as how to strike the correct gameplay between balance and story, adapting the Chinese Journey to the West myth into a contemporary game story for a Western audience, and how the current generation, emerging technology, and the state of the independent studio landscape is affecting game development.
What was the creative process for this IP? Relationships between characters can really bring games to life, in a way. Features - Lessons from the Trenches. I believe that making a game is part art and part science, so it's no wonder that managing a game project is also part art and part science.
Clearly if it was all science then the industry would get a collective F for not having made any significant progress over the last decade - all one has to do is just glance at the published postmortems to see that the same patterns are repeated over and over. A game has to be fun, engaging, grab users in the first two minutes and also keep their attention for countless more hours. These requirements place a very difficult burden onto design directors and project managers who are tasked with quantifying "fun" and then determining that at some point in the project enough fun elements have been introduced into the game so that it can actually ship.
Complicating matters are fixed budgets, tight timelines and dealing with team dynamics. While there are no clear-cut answers, there are obviously best practices. Making waterfall development work. According to Eric Preisz, CEO of GarageGames -- creators of the Torque engine -- waterfall can still work, as long as you know what you're making and you can accurately define the process.
While he says that it's not as useful if you're spending time trying to "find the fun" in a concept, waterfall development still has its place. Here are Preisz's tips -- taken from his new feature about how GarageGames estimates and executes tasks. "GarageGames is a service company and in the majority of the cases we see, the formula for customer's desire on an initial consultation is usually something similar the following," writes Preisz. "I want X by the date of Y.
How much will you charge me? " A customer wants a firm fixed price (FFP) quote for a game-related software development project. Features - Waterfall Game Development Done Right. Agile, Agile, Agile.
It's hard to disagree with a project management process named "Agile". It's like disagreeing with something named the "Patriot Act" or answering "No" to a department store checkout attendant that asks if you would like to save 20 percent on today's purchase. It's clear: Agile is cool, and every Scrum master certificate mill will agree with that statement. But what happens when an Agile paradigm isn't appropriate? "How is that possible? " There are two scenarios where we think a more "waterfally" approach is appropriate (We'll explain the "more" part later... because no one could ever be purely waterfall if you think the name implies a rigid schedule). Features - Leading Change - An Excerpt from Beyond Critical. [How do you really motivate your development team to change its methods?
In this excerpt from his book Beyond Critical: Improving Leadership in Game Development, producer Keith Fuller blends personal experience and literature to explain how you can steer your team.] Okay, so you'll need to do something differently at some point. How? Being a leader doesn't automatically mean people will happily accept any given change you attempt to institute. I learned that the hard way the day -- and it only lasted one day -- I tried to force an entire team to only play our game using a controller instead of mouse and keyboard.
If the primary SKU is the 360, we should make sure programmers and artists are developing the game with the appropriate input device, right? Features - Building A Great Game Team: Measuring Progress. [When building a great game development team, how do you keep everyone on track?
Game HR veteran Marc Mencher continues his in-progress Gamasutra series, discussing how to meet goals and reward top employees.] A team is made up of individuals who perform unique tasks, and when combined, produce a finished product that is greater than the sum of its parts. You want team members to do their best and be ready to help others, so you need to promote a sense of cohesion; the team will only succeed if everyone works together. Your team should be able to generate their own tasks, tackle problems, agree on solutions and implement their decisions with confidence.
Challenge perceived assumptions to improve team productivity and effectiveness: "Problems and their solutions are always isolated. " Features - Improving Your Studio: What Your Producer Told Me. [Production consultant Keith Fuller surveys the industry to find out what producers really think about their studios -- both their strengths and what's holding them back -- and shares the results with Gamaustra, drawing compelling conclusions.]
Features - Building On Conviction: Inside Ubisoft Toronto. Features - Successful Playtesting In Swords & Soldiers. Swords & Soldiers is a critically acclaimed WiiWare side-scrolling RTS -- and it's about to be released for PlayStation Network. The new controls required a user test. For this, the game's development studio, Ronimo, collaborated with Valsplat, a usability research company. Here is how we at Valsplat set up the test, what Ronimo did with the results, and what we learned from the experience. The goal of Swords & Soldiers is to destroy the opponent's tower and defend your own.
You build soldiers with gold you've dug. Features - Game Dev Collaboration: Google Docs Style. [Unsure if Google Docs is the right way to manage online collaboration with your video game team? Game industry veteran Chris Oltyan takes a hard look at its strengths and weaknesses, offering examples, praise, and criticism.] Features - Quick and Dirty Prototyping: A Success Story. Last November at the IGDA Leadership Forum, I gave a short talk on quick and dirty prototyping as a production method for small PC games. The topic was met with curiosity, as most producers were already comfortable with their existing waterfall or agile methodologies. While our studio, Boomzap Entertainment, is agile in the simplest definition of the word ("can move fast, is flexible"), we don't follow Scrum, XP, or any of the popular frameworks.
Instead, we've tweaked a process that works best for our indie studio for the past five years -- a process I like to call "quick and dirty prototyping", though no one else at Boomzap refers to it as such. You can read a short summary of the presentation here.