Almost without exception, every project leaves the bulk of production until the last 4-6 months of the project. It doesn’t seem to matter if development is scheduled for 12-months or 36-months.
In large part, I think this due to lack of or poor quality pre-production. If, instead, the first 4-months were devoted to rigorous pre-production, the team might be able to hit the ground running. If the core technology was in place: shaders, AI code, primary assets—then the rest of the project could be devoted to generating content.
Documentation, too, is key. Every artist and designer on the team should be able to reference detailed descriptions on each piece of the puzzle. Clear instructions on how to construct materials, target polygon count and texture resolution, memory budgets, scripted sequences, the export pipeline, ad nauseam.
Documents are boring to write. People resist “early optimization.” No one is willing to commit to a features lock-down. Mostly there is no pressure. It’s the pressure at the end of a project to hit the milestones of alpha, beta, and release candidate that get the team to focus. It’s the poor framerate and lack of available memory that get the team really focused on managing the code and assets. That cool piece of technology that was supposed to make the game really stand out? It turns out it doesn’t work and you two weeks to fix it. The team gets cut crazy. Features are cut. Content is cut. The project is a shadow of its former ambitions.
So the question is, how do you put pressure up front? Early-alpha? Hard deadlines? How can you be rigid without stiffling creativity?
Maybe we realize that we aren’t that creative in the first place? We reward cleverness, not creativity. In the end we stamp out the same game as last time with a face-lift. Sounds a lot like shovel-ware.
Maybe we base the whole product on one good idea and place all the focus there. Something to differentiate the title from everything else on shelf. Sounds awfully risky. And we all know that today’s publishers are terribly risk-averse.
How do you get the team excited, or at least not indifferent, to the boring parts?
Tags: crunch time, schedules