Breaking The Wheel

Operations

Game Planning With Science Preface Featured Image

Discovery Versus Process – A Preface to Game Planning With Science!

How can we wrap our heads around the chaos of game development? By understanding that the famous phrase “find the fun” implies something important: discovery. How do you manage the creative process? By acknowledging the latter word of the phrase: process. If you can understand how those terms related – and where they differ – you can appreciate something vital to effective production. That nothing we do in game development is completely devoid of process. And, if you can learn to separate the process from the discovery, then science becomes a weapon against the dark forces of development hell.

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New Guest Post: If You Want To Lead, Know Your Values

This week’s post…is hosted elsewhere. I wrote a guest post for my new friends at Black Shell Media. The post, “If You Want to Lead, Know Your Values”, is about a topic near and dear to my heart. Values matter to any organization, no matter the size. They matter from a company culture standpoint, certainly. But they also matter operationally and strategically. The most successful companies in the world have well-defined corporate values. But what are their values and, more importantly, how should you pick your own? Click this link to read on!

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Monday Menagerie, October 17th Edition

In “Monday Menagerie” posts, I share the most interesting articles I’ve stumbled across in my roamings around the ol’ series of tubes. This week, the science backed reason negative people are killing you (literally), why engineers HATE open floor plans, and how an editor at the Atlantic keeps his email inbox at zero.

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Sunk-Costs and Ugly Babies: On The Value of The Scientific Method – Game Planning With Science! Part 8 Featured Image

Sunk-Costs and Ugly Babies: On The Value of The Scientific Method – Game Planning With Science! Part 8

It struck me one day that “Game Planing With Science” has a glaring omission: the value of scrapping a plan. The goal of “Game Planning With Science” is to forecast, not predict. It’s to estimate and understand, but not to codify. You can’t codify the creative process, or the future for that matter. Just as important is the fact that life doesn’t care about your plans. Reality is going to be what it’s going to be. You can’t change reality to fit your plan, so modifying your plan to fit reality is the only path forward. As Dwight Eisenhower, one of the most immensely quotable people ever, once said, “Plans are useless, but planning is everything.”

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Monday Menagerie: Sept 26th Edition

In “Monday Menagerie” I share the most interesting articles I’ve seen around the interwebnets. This week: the two simple questions you should be asking (but probably aren’t), the four signs that outsourcing can be your best friend, and the one biggest secret to making great hires.

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5 Vital Business Principles in the Form of Pithy Quotes

I. Love. Aphorisms. Sure some are pure hogwash. But the really good ones convey a lot of truth in a small space. In this post, I gathered 5 of my favorite quotes, and explain how they relate to effective management.

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Guest Posting Like A Mofo: Volume I

I’ve been busy guest posting over the last few weeks. And rather than quickly pinch off a lackluster post for this site just for the sake of posting, I’m instead going to talk about what I’ve been up to, and where you can find it.

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A diagram of Porter's Five Forces Analysis

Five-Forces Analysis has Grim Tidings for Free-To-Play on Mobile

This post about five forces analysis originally appeared on my old blog and Gamasutra. I find that it’s as relevant today as it was then. Mobile is still a hot bed of both independent and publisher-backed development. And for good reason. There is a massive addressable market and mobile devices have high user engagement. Mobile also supports smaller test launches and rapid iteration, meaning that developers and publishers can treat mobile games less like products and more like businesses. Add to that the lack of any marginal production or distribution costs, and you have a super-sexy platform. And that’s exactly the problem. Mobile is so attractive and so accessible that the market place is perhaps the purest example of “perfect competition”, the yin to a monopoly’s yang.

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Scheduling Video Games Scientifically featured image

Scheduling Video Games Scientifically! – Game Planning With Science! Part 7

This post is a bit of a capstone. It utilizes all of the tools to make video games scientifically that I covered in the Parts 1-6 of “Game Planning With Science”. Make sure you’ve reviewed those weighty tomes before digging in here. In this post, I’m going to walk you through how to utilize capacity charts, story points, user stories, variance, and the central limit theorem to forecast development time lines.

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User Stories Make For Better Consensus – Game Planning With Science! Part 6 Featured Image

User Stories Make For Better Consensus – Game Planning With Science! Part 6

There’s a saying in data science: Garbage In, Garbage Out (or GIGO, if you prefer). The most advanced formulas and models won’t provide outputs worth a dead cat if you don’t have high quality inputs. When it comes to something as difficult and uncertain as feature planning and estimation, that’s quadruply so. In this post I’m going to walk you through the system I’ve used successfully, how it works, and why. And it’s all based on the counter part to the story points from Part 5, user stories.

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