Breaking The Wheel

Art Assets

A bunch of scientists. Featured image for a post on lean development
– Posted Under: Game Planning With Science!, Management, Operations, Production 4 Comments

Lean Development for Games – Game Planning With Science! Part 9

1947. Japan, still reeling from the Second World War, lies in economic ruin. And a little company called Toyota finds itself in a highly undesirable strategic position. It’s headquartered in a nation in tatters, and competing with companies in the world’s newest economic super-power: ‘Merca. How could it possible compete against companies with such amazing access to capital, resources and cash-rich customers? Well, necessity, as they say, is the mother of invention. And the necessities of Toyota’s strategic realities gave birth to one of the most remarkable feats of management ever achieved: the Toyota Production System. Or, more generically, “lean” development.

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Scheduling Video Games Scientifically featured image
– Posted Under: Art, Design, Game Planning With Science!, Operations, Production, Tips for Indies 1 Comment

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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Character Art Pipeline Capacity Charts featured image of a scientist with test tubes
– Posted Under: Art, Game Planning With Science!, Management, Operations, Practical Guides, Production 6 Comments

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.

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Video Game Art Pipelines featured image: a scientist
– Posted Under: Art, Game Planning With Science!, Operations, Production 14 Comments

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.

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