The Rules

Below are some rules for development of the next game. Believe it or not, creativity flourishes within a good set of tight rules. They help to prevent development getting lost in and becoming directionless. Note how I've used the word “must”. Normally I use the word “should”. I'll make a blog post on this aspect of communicating project management in the future.


THE RULES OF DEVELOPMENT

Before development begins pre-development must be complete
before a single asset is made the entire project should be storyboarded, tightly briefed, specced out, thoroughly concepted and thought out to the nth degree. Illustrations should be ready to work and develop with in the production phase. There must be a Pre-development video of how the final game will look.

The format of the game must be scaleable
It must be possible to develop and play the game on iPhone, browser, PC, XNA, 360, PSN (this does mean that the game will be on these platforms, it should be as easy as possible, without sacrificing quality, to port to these platforms)

The game must be supported with a concerted Marketing effort
there must be blogs, tweets, trailers, competitions, videos etc

It must be effectively, qualitatively play tested throughout the whole of development
During pre-development there must be weekly reviews of the materials as they are made.
During production there must be a focus test every two weeks. There should be developer playtest every week.

It must be playtested every week.
There must be developer playtests to see and log how development is going. To see what's missing, what could be improved and what's still to be done.

The game play must be iterated upon
the Agile methodology must be used to iterate on game play during pre development and development.


Next steps
My aim is to document every part of the development process. To create a very open development that everyone can see, examine and learn from by observing the successes and the failures.

Rubbish drawings and good drawings, good game designs and bad game designs. The expected and the unexpected.

Which means from now on there will be more pictures! :D

With these rules in mind my next steps are to create a backlog and start making materials to focus test. This is where the exciting stuff starts happening. More on what the backlog is and my initial explorations in the next post.

Till then!