What does good scoping for your video game look like? That’s the question posed by Blossom Arcade founder Sophie Smart during the Self-Publishing Toolkit live sessions at London Games Festival.
Through her consultancy agency Blossom Arcade, Smart supports indie studios with production, publishing strategy, and release management. She previously worked at notable companies like Sumo Digital, Coatsink, and No More Robots, and feels there are a few common errors developers make when attempting to chart a course to market.
Primarily, she warns attendees to avoid mistaking a scope document for a tangible plan. “You need to come up with a list of features and break them down by task with estimates and work out how many months you have to develop your title and how long the project will take,” she explains.
“The big thing I want you all to take away from this is that your scope document is not your plan. I speak to a lot of small teams who explain ‘oh yeah, we’ve got every feature listed and we’re ticking them off.’ That is not your plan. That is just a list of tasks and you’re completing then.”
According to Smart, what your plan actually needs is a set of milestones and goals that allow you to complete sections of the game at specific intervals. Something that will also enable you to accurately estimate your budgeting needs.
“Once you’ve got that, you’ll be able to know how many months you’ll have your team working on a project,” she continues.
Can the Scrum framework help you avoid production hell?
When it comes to executing that plan, Smart encourages developers to lean on the Scrum framework. For those unfamiliar with the term, she describes Scrum as a methodology that brings teams together for sprint planning meetings where you choose to complete one key project element by the end of a period usually lasting between one to four weeks.
“You have this sprint planning meeting. You flesh your tasks out for that particular feature. You work your sprint. You have daily standups where the team can communicate. Then, at the end of that sprint, you hope you can use that feature and you sit down as a team and play the game to decide whether you’re happy with it—or whether it needs more work,” she explains.
Smart believes Scrum is great at facilitating iteration and maintaining open lines of communication within your team. It is also, she notes, vital in ensuring you always have a playable product—which might be useful if you’re flirting with the idea of an early access launch.
There are other ways to approach production, of course, but Smart warns against deploying one framework in particular: Waterfall.
She explains the Waterfall approach might feel especially compelling for teams without dedicated producers, largely because it involves completing a series of tasks in a sequence that seems organic. Different people working on different tasks unique to their discipline. It makes sense, right? It can—until that flow breaks down due to external factors.
“If somebody is off sick for a couple of days, then the next person [in the chain] doesn’t get what they needed to be able to work on their bits, and so they end top working on something else. A different part of the game altogether,” she says.
“What happens then is you have masses of different bits of the game that are all completed at different stages, and none of it is playable together. That is production hell. You can just never see whether your game is fun […] because you can’t even play it.”
Image via Game Developer
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