Breaking The Wheel

Production

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.

Read More »
Story Points for Feature Estimation – Game Planning With Science! Part 5 Featured Image

Story Points for Feature Estimation – Game Planning With Science! Part 5

In Part 4 of “Game Planning With Science!”, I covered the central limit theorem, and how we can use it for forecasting feature development. At the end of the post I acknowledged that it’s no mean feat to track the time per individual feature without some heavy duty project management software and a team that is superlatively disciplined about tracking their time. In Part 5, I’m going to give you my favorite tool for getting around this problem: Story Points.

Read More »
Game Planning with Science Part 4, Planning Games with the Central Limit Theorem featured image

Planning Games Using The Central Limit Theorem – Game Planning With Science! Part 4

In Part 4 of “Game Planning With Science”, I’m going to wrap up the statistics primer I started in Part 3. This time, I’ll cover one of the most fascinating aspects of statistics: the Central Limit Theorem. Why does one aspect of statistics deserve its own post? BECAUSE IT’S FRIGGIN’ RAD, THAT’S WHY! Also (and probably more importantly) it allows us to make predictions when planning games, even if we don’t have a lot of data.

Read More »
Video Game Statistics featured image of three scientists talking

Video Game Statistics: A Primer – Game Planning With Science! Part 3

In parts 1 and 2 of “Game Planning With Science!” I covered the basics of process management and capacity charts. Now, in Part 3, I’m going to step away from direct operations management to discuss some basic concepts of statistics. Riveting, I know. But also essential if you want to be able to forecast accurately and confidently. There will be some heavy lifting in this post, but hang in there. A better understanding of statistics will change the way you see and treat your own data. It will also make you a more informed consumer of the information the rest of the world vomits at you every day.

Read More »
Character Art Pipeline Capacity Charts featured image of a scientist with test tubes

Character Art Pipeline Capacity Charts – Game Planning With Science! Part 2

In Part 1 of Game Planning With Science, I covered the fundamentals of operations management: critical paths, bottlenecks, and Little’s Law. If you haven’t read Part 1 yet, I suggest you do. Unless you’re familiar with the equations behind those concepts, Part 2 will be a little tricky to follow. But if you’re up to speed, read on. In Part 2, I’m going to walk you through how to assemble a capacity chart. You can use capacity charts to optimize your character art pipelines and add resources where they will do the most good.

Read More »
Video Game Art Pipelines featured image: a scientist

Video Game Art Pipelines – Game Planning With Science! Part 1

The fundamental tools of operations science (also called decision science) were designed with factories and warehouses in mind. But they are easily applicable to video game art asset pipelines. In this post, I’ll walk you through the basics of how operation science looks at pipelines, called “process flows” in operations speak.

Read More »
A picture of Dark Souls and an Ikea location, both instances of strategic design in action

Strategic Design: Why Dark Souls is the Ikea of Game Development

One of the sources of crunch is the proverbial kitchen sink: throwing too much content and too many features into a design with too short a production schedule. The reasons can be myriad. Features in competing games. Pressure from publishers or marketing departments. Overblown ambition. The instinct makes sense. As the saying goes, nobody sets out to make a bad game and to that end there is a reluctance to cut corners or make omissions that would compromise quality. But, what if there was a way to cut content and features strategically, so as to make your game more competitive and better serve the needs of your fans? Enter: Strategic Design.

Read More »