Comments on: Scrum … and Production, Pre-Production in games

By: Paul Taylor

Paul Taylor — Wed, 07 Jul 2010 09:15:45 +0000

A great read Adam,
It’s really interesting to look at all the different industries and areas that modern game development has inherited from.
To date some of the best development methodologies in use stem from Agile (among other things), and as Peter acknowledged, are heavily augmented with what actually works within individual game developments.
Perhaps one day we will be able to formalise some of these processes as a basis for evolving our practices.

-Keep up the good work!

By: Rifter

Rifter — Mon, 11 Aug 2008 17:53:52 +0000

Just one comment about the movie industry – you’re NOT correct in your assumption that the script finalizes everything that will happen on set. There’s a ton of movies who are famously written (and re-written) on set, e.g. Casablanca.

More importantly, however, a lot of directors feel that the movie actually happens during editing. Walter Murch had to re-cut The English Patient countless times over the course of a year in order to make the time transitions to work.

So it’s a lot closer than you think. Editing is a lot like beta …

Funny thing is you don’t get to do a Director’s Cut of a game. Never.

By: Mark Bernard

Mark Bernard — Fri, 11 Jul 2008 12:16:35 +0000

Here is a free ebook I found. Here’s a quote from the website:

“This book aims to give you a head start by providing a detailed down-to-earth account of how one Swedish company implemented Scrum and XP with a team of approximately 40 people and how they continuously improved their process over a year’s time.”

http://www.infoq.com/minibooks/scrum-xp-from-the-trenches

By: Peter Freese

Peter Freese — Tue, 01 Jul 2008 19:02:36 +0000

We use agile methods, not “Agile” (note the proper name case). We employ some of the concepts from Scrum, but any Scrum advocate would tell you we’re not using Scrum. And this varies from project to project, depending on the whims of the leads.

Some of the most useful aspects of Scrum I’ve found for pre-production are 2-week sprints with runnable (demonstrable) deliverables, daily stand-ups, and a feature backlog. We don’t use burn-down charts; I usually put the sprint goals on a whiteboard in the stand-up area and keep it updated continuously so anyone and everyone can see what we have completed and what needs to be done to meet our sprint goals.

By: adam

adam — Sat, 28 Jun 2008 12:20:21 +0000

“we use pre-production to prototype design concepts and technology ideas, with the understanding that these don’t become working parts of our game”

Have you tried using Scrum? I’d be interested to know how you see this prototyping relating to Scrum. We do something very similar, a pre-pre-production :), to do ultra throw-away prototyping, but that was started before scrum, and integrating it into Scrum (getting prototypes to move from this incubation stage to a scrum pre-prod stage) is something I don’t fully understand.

By: Peter Freese

Peter Freese — Sat, 28 Jun 2008 00:04:50 +0000

As a data point for the semantics of pre-production: we use pre-production to prototype design concepts and technology ideas, with the understanding that these don’t become working parts of our game. One of the ways we ensure that prototype code doesn’t get morphed into shipping code by an overly aggressive production schedule (or publisher) is by doing prototyping in languages that allow rapid development, but aren’t necessarily suitable for shipping.

Pre-production for large projects seems to be typically trending in the 12-24 month time frame. One of the largest factors I see as a distinction between pre-production and full production is the funding model, with the latter being almost exclusively publisher supplied, and the former between a combination of self-funding and investor driven.