GameDevBlog

Schizoid Available on Mobile

Hey - if you have a Verizon smartphone, you can now play Schizoid wherever, thanks to Skyzone Entertainment.  They've done a really good job of keeping the look and feel of the game on a tiny little handset...

Awesome.

Scheduling Mistake #37

This one's going to be obvious to most people, but I have read a book that says to do the opposite, so:

A lot of the scrum / agile guys advise against splitting your schedule up by resource:  don't have a bunch of "QA" tasks that are estimated separately from your "Designer" tasks that are estimated separately from your "Coder" tasks, and are all tracked independently, because that creates an us-against-them mindset.  "We desinger types are done with our responsibilities, it's you coder types that are holding us back."  It should be one-for-all, all-for-one: if you're falling behind, your designers and QA guys and whatnot should find ways to help in whatever way they can, even if it's just getting coffee for and giving back massages to those poor coders.  *Agile Estimating And Planning* is one book that recommends this practice.

"Man, that's beautiful," I thought, when I read this.  And that's how I scheduled Schizoid, lumping the art tasks and the code tasks and the music tasks into one big pile.  Of course, in reality, there's no way James Chao, once he was done making his beautiful art, was going to help me fix network play bugs.  Even if he did want to roll up his sleeves and start programming.  (Or get me coffee and give me back massages.)

So, for games anyway, don't do that!  Typically what we do - Schizoid being the exception - is schedule in a matrix that looks something like this:

Code Art Design

Main Menu 2 5 0

Eyeball Enemy 5 8 3

We're still using a lot of techniques from *Agile Estimating* - such planning poker, fibonacci-size numbers, estimation in generic work-units instead of days, and a serious aversion to Gantt charts.  But the result we end up with gives us a better idea of how many coders vs. artists we need, and let's us track velocity separately.

But is tracking velocity separately a good thing?  Some would say it divides the team.  (And there's often a rift between coders and artists to begin with.)  But it's probably worth knowing whether art or code is behind and by how much, so you can adjust staff and cut features accordingly!  At least you're not singling out individuals.

Interestingly, Clinton Keith told me recently that he now works specialization into his agile consulting and training.  I wonder how his approach works?

Too Much Randomness?

I should have mentioned that the Bejeweled Blitz leaderboards are reset weekly;  so the fact that PopCap guys are at the top of my list is not because they played a lot back in the day and once got a really good score - it's because they get really good scores every week.  So while they may play more each week than you or me (hey, it's their job, after all) it's still pretty impressive.  (Others think they must be cheating - to which I say, "Think that if you want.  Whatever helps you sleep at night.")

Still, Jeremy argues that they're too random, and the very fact that he perceives the randomness to outweigh his skill, that he doesn't think it's worth investing his time, may go to show that they overdid it...or maybe it just goes to show that you can't please everybody...

Permanent leaderboards, by the way, are not a good thing.  Not for the longevity of a game, anyway - right away, some awesome player will stake out some awesome score and 99.9% of other players will decide it's not even worth competing.  Even if it's just a friends list competition - the deltas between friends are high enough to drive people away.