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Archive for the ‘Management’ Category
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Monday, September 13th, 2010 Today is Hippie Day!
Wednesday, May 5th, 2010At Southend we have something that is called hippie day. No, we don’t practice free love in the park and smoke weed all day (at least some of us don’t) – it’s a day in which everyone is free to work on their own concepts that they can present to the team at the end of the day.
Some will work on new tech, some will work on a graphical style that they are interested in exploring and some will write down gameplay concepts or even stories.
The concepts might become projects, some might work as an inspiration for ongoing projects.
An Action Brawler Rhythm MMORPG exclusively for Amiga CD32?
In a lot of ways it’s like fishing. You might just catch a big one. But then you have to be really quiet and wear a fishing hat. Eh…
Karja working on the next big thing
iloscrumilo
Friday, January 22nd, 2010Hi everyone! My name is Fredrik, and I’m the producer of ilomilo. As a producer, I’m responsible for the overall quality of the game, to keep track of the production schedule and to make sure everyone on the team is happy and have what they need to make a good game! Today, I would like to tell you a little about how the team works and how we decide what to do next in the project.
For the development of ilomilo, we use a project management method called “scrum”, which is quite common in the games and software industry. It basically means that instead of planning the entire project in detail from start, we work in iterations that we call “sprints”, and once we have completed a sprint, we plan the next and so on. This means that we can easily change direction in the middle of the project, without losing too much time.
Every morning, we have a scrum meeting with the entire team in our cozy scrum corner. As you can see on the picture above, everyone is really happy =). Each member of the team gets to tell the others what they have done since the last meeting, what they will do today and if they are having any problems. That way, everyone gets a daily update of what is going on in the project, and any problems can be quickly solved. The whole meeting usually takes around 10 minutes.
Computer software development in general and games development in particular are turbulent and changeable processes. Technical complexity combined with creativity means that you constantly need to create new technical inventions and design solutions. In fact, the only thing you can rely on is that things are going to change! That is why scrum is such a good method for game development.
Naturally, scrum does not magically solve everything. We still need to have a rough plan of the entire project, and a detailed design document. The important thing is to know that they are going to change. Planning ahead is important, planning to much is a waste of time.
That’s all for now!