Scheduling game production is like herding cats, snakes and artists.  I’ll leave it up to you to determine who is more insulted in that last sentence.

Scheduling comes down to putting the doers with the planners.  There are levels of decision makers that must be consulted when you have large teams.  I know of few products that shipped exactly according to their initial schedule.  While most of my products have shipped on time, I can’t say they fit exactly to the first schedule.

Often the higher ups decide that a product must ship at a specific date and that requires you to constrict the features in order to ship.  Remembering time for QA, it always takes longer than expected, can be the key to shipping your title with high quality even if you have to trim features.

The best advice I can give you, small or large tam, is to conduct experiments.  If you make a schedule that has 15 levels, and each level is scheduled to take 4 weeks, that’s 60 weeks just for levels.  While your tam is making this first level, monitor their progress closely.  If they take 8 weeks to make level 1, level 2 isn’t going to take 4 weeks as planned.  Even if the entire team tells you that the next levels will go faster now that they’ve finished one.

Always identify those features that can be removed for time constraints.  Better to know a the start that you can remove features that have to kill something you love farther on in development.

Dive head down into the first chucks of development and watch closely the team interactions.  If the team is staying weekends or working 14 hour days, you need to remember this when you review the schedule.

Even with SCRUM, reviewing what you are developing as a whole is paramount to shipping with feature complete at the quality the market demands.  Remember that with waterfall or SCRUM, you should never bite off more than you can chew.

Making your schedule is as much a team effort as is the game development.  Building the schedule with your team gives them a sense of ownership that doesn’t happen when you make the schedule and present it to them.  While it’s fine to put required milestones up, and then work backwards, the teams respond better if they build it with your requirements in mind.

In the future I’ll post about part two, maintaining the schedule.

Mac

We play games.  Games, GAMES.  These are meant to be entertaining and FUN.  Often I have sat in meetings and listened to big burly men discuss the merits of the brown fluffy bunnies vs. the pink fluffy bunnies. (Side note: one of my favorite industry friends is Scott Rhode, and I will NEVER forget hearing him tell how his game idea was rejected because two previous games that had sand in them had failed therefore a beach volleyball game would fail too)

So when I come along a review or comment that shows the writer is having FUN, I laugh and have to quote it.

…look like no aliens you’ve ever had to fight off before. Okay, maybe if you’re Spider-Man, you’ll find yourself on familiar ground. Everyone else is screwed.

This is from a review of the new XCOM trailer that looks very cool too.  But DO go read the entire review and watch the video on JOYSTIQ, and dig their new look.

Mac

P.S.  And if you’re wondering, I have NO idea why Hemingway’s picture comes up when Zemanta is looking for pictures based on this post, but that too cracked me up.

Sometimes you need a reality check. Sometimes you need an adviser, but never need a used car salesmen.

Headhunters make their money by placing you in a position.  They make no money if they can’t place you, and even less if they talk to you on the phone for hours.

I have fired headhunters in the past.  I give them hard deadlines.  They have to call me and let me know what is going on within 72 hours of sending my resume a potential employer.  I won’t put up with: “I sent in your resume and I’ll call them in a week”.  If a company wants you, they answer within 3 days.  They don’t take weeks or months to fill a position.

While it’s never a good idea to contact companies directly, a headhunter knows the hiring manager and get a feel for them and if they’re considering you,  I feel that it’s acceptable to send a nice note to a HR email address, saying only that you are very excited about a position that and that you are represented by a specific company or headhunter.

Several times I have been told a resume was sent it, when it was not.  Always good to send a “thanks for considering me” email even when you’re rejected for a position.

A good headhunter will tell you why you’re a perfect fit for a job, or why they won’t send you in for it. A bad headhunter will judge you just by your resume and not contact you again.  A really really bad headhunter will tell you something like: “You’re a programmer, just be happy doing that”, when you apply for a position as a manager of programmers.

Watch out for those that don’t listen when you tell them something that you think is important.  If THEY don’t value you, then how can they rperesent you as a quality candidate for the position?

Watch out for those that say they send in a resume, and you never hear from them again.  That means that you were rejected and the headhunter doesn’t respect you enough to take the time to call and tell you that. 

A good headhunter will tell you: “Nope, I don’t have anything for you right now.  But this is what you need to do…”.

Questions?  Bring’m on!

Mac

Engagement
Retention
Free and paid optional actions
Economic balance
Player to player social interactivity

Those of you that know ANYTHING about Play-By-Mail (PBM), know that these are the exact same issues. The biggest company in PBM was Schubel & Son. I met Mr Shubel at a Star Trek convention in 1976. It was before he got into PBM and his son was a toddler.  He understood the basic principles  of engagement, retention, free vs. paid options, economics and social interaction between players. While PBM was never a huge industry, there is no question that Schubel & Sons was a leading company.

This encourages the player to keep going, to come back, to be involved. This engagement, results in retention. The player must always be able to do SOMETHING.  This leads to Free and Paid options.  The free options are always available, even if they are limited by “energy” that must be regenerated over time. The player must only leave the game because they have other priorities, not because they have run out of options.

Paid options are the difference between a handgun and a M16.  They both have devastating affects, but the M16 has greater range and can deliver more bullets faster. While there are many possible examples, this is the one I use as a test with every feature of a PBM game or now, a Facebook game.

There are plenty of examples of the non-player characters, in Shubel & Son games, attacking without reason, and of course ANY battle resulted in a fee to the players account.  But as a player, knowing that at any time you could be attacked, you stayed always defensive, but also risky.

Typically turns in PBM games are weekly, bi-weekly or even monthly.  The fees were $4.00 or up to $15 a turn and people played these games for YEARS.  Because the basic principles were met.

The economy in a game is as important as being true to the theme.  If you’re in a Sci-Fi game, you might get out of sorts if your character has to wield a colt 45.  For the economics, if that colt 45 is 50 game bucks, and the bullets are 500, there is just as much of a problem. While that is an obvious and dramatic problem,  most economic problems are much more subtle.

A game designer I admire very much is Sid Meir.  One of his basic principles has been adapted by many game designers, including myself.  That principle is that the game should be playable as early as possible in the development process.  Getting the economy “playable” at the beginning of the process is just as important.  You need to know why the players buy a certain weapon, why they buy a spell or seem to gravitate towards a special ability more than the others LONG before the game goes public.  To leave these into the players hands without testing, is foolish. 

Schubel & son realized very quickly that players wanted much more than to just fight with each other.  They wanted to learn from experienced players, they wanted to form alliances and wanted communication avenues that allowed for a meta-game to be created.  They wanted to be able to negotiate the terms of surrender on a 1-1 level.

Unlike today with instant communication, in 1980 we had only snail mail.  But players used the in game communication systems to their maximum, and then asked to connect directly. It was this direction connection that pushed the games to a higher level, and that’s what Facebook does best.

So you think Mafia Wrs is new?  You think Farmville was discovered as a great design in Facebook gaming?  You think virtual good is new?  Think again, think about PBM.  Companies like Schubel & Son, Rick Loomis of Flying Buffalo, these people created this business and we can learn a lot from them.  And if we ignore them as no or low tech, we’ll suffer the fate of those companies and games that didn’t follow the principles that they created.

What PBM have you played lately?  Farmville?  That’s a good one.

Mac

I love the title of this post.  I have a hunch that after reading that your first thought was something like; “What’s that?” or “What does he mean by that?”. Good! All through time, or at least the last 29 years, I have read and it has been said ti me to: “Get the vision” or to “understand my vision”.  I have actually said that a big part of my job early on is to communicate the vision of the product.

I am a visual guy.  I am an awful speller in part because when I imagine things, I see shapes and colors and objects, not letters. It’s these shapes and objects that becomes games, or control interfaces, or blog posts. My job is to communicate that vision to people who look at things differently than I do.

Now that we’ve defined “vision”, let’s talk about community.

Back in the old days, the community was JUST those people who bought your game. The question was, how do we keep them involved. Side note here: companies that only care about getting the product purchased, and then ignore the customer, often go bankrupt or are just a flash in the pan.

Community is the made up of first, people who bought your game.  It then splits into factions.  There will be those who tell their friends about it, those that only play it on their lunch hour, those that only play it when their friend is over to play multi-player, those that use your in-game tools to create content, those that blog or create fan sites about it, and those that will follow yur around like puppies at game conventions.

That’s a lot of different needs that need to be met for “community”. Most companies fail to meet all of these factions needs. Actually, most just meet one or two, and hope that’s enough to encourage people to buy the downloadable content, DLC, or at least the sequel.

But let me through another wrench in the mix, Facebook and Twitter.  Facebook IS a community for your game all by itself.  Their needs are communication directly with YOU.  The twitter folks are a offshoot of Facebook and there is huge crossover between them. We’ve been known to call these groups Twitbookers or the Twitbook community.

Your vision of your community must include all of these factions and your priorities must be on the amount of impact these groups have on your sales.  Obviously the Twitbookers are about immediate communication.  Gone are the days where a product was a “fire and forget” proposition. I suggest also that the days of complete secret development are gone as well.  We want the consumers to know what we’re working on, we NEED them to know.  And furthermore, we HAVE to let them know so they’ll talk about it.

At board game conventions I always say, “Draw a crowd, because crowds breed crowds.  And crowds mean buzz, and buzz means sales”.  Your job as a developer or publisher is to create a community vision, which are your major groups and how will you meet their needs, BEFORE the product is launched and  suggest you do it as the game is being designed.

Feed the community by creating the vision.  The more you feed them, the more they’re talk about your game.

So let me ask you this, what is the vision of your community?

Mac

I am also asked about dealing with other departments, internal or external development groups and which I prefer, how will I handle a situation where I’m not responsible for XXX where most producers are. My favorite question: “What do you do in your off time?”  My answer: “I’m a Producer, my off time is when I’m dead”.

But one question threw me and I wish I had revised my answer.

The question was: Are you an optimist, a pessimist or somewhere in between?  

The answer I gave at the time was: “Mostly Optimist”.  But in hindsight, I should have said simply: “Yes”.  Because as a Producer I have to be all of those.

Optimist: “Yes the project will be great, yes we’re working hard for a good reason, yes the public will love it”

Pessimist: “No you’re not giving enough time for that feature, no we need more QA time,  no that’s just not good enough compared to the rest of the team, no I’m not satisfied because I know we/you/I can do better”

Somewhere in between: “I think if I sleep on this, I’ll have a better solution. Let’s not wait instead let’s be proactive”

And I am sure there are flavors that I am missing here since none of these three has a clear dividing line.  The point here is that when you are on a team, no matter the role, make sure that you look at what you are doing from all three of the above angles. 

So here is my question… which of these are you?

Mac

Recently as a iPhone game development networking talk, that’s where a few hundred people get together under the excuse of a “talk” when really they’re there to network with people and steal them from their current employers,  the newish head of a large social network proposed that a lincense on a game means nothing.

The room burst into laughter and answered him with a collective: “You’re kidding right?” But sadly, he wasn’t.  I could grab the microphone faster enough for my question to be relevant, but I really wanted to say: “Hi I’m Mac Senour, I p;lay a little golf. With Tiger Woods recent problems, do you think EA could put me on the cover and sales would be exactly the same?”.  The answer is, no of course not.  But this persons answer, I’m presuming, would be yes.

Clearly he and I think very differently.

The value of a license is that split second that the consumer takes to give your game a second look. Once they have purchased a game, I agree that the license means nothing.  It then all depends on the game itself.  After th consumer has bought the game there is no difference between Mac Senour Golf and Tiger Woods Golf.

The reason a publisher buys a license is to buy that split second look from the consumer.  It would make no sense to spend $50,000 to get the rights to use my likeness in a golf game if you didn’t know for a fact that it would increase sales to offset that expense. And for the record, I’m a little cheaper than that.

What licenses have you seen for a game that DIDN’T make you take the second look?

While you’re pondering that, keep in mind this story… a board game designer who is considered legendary noted that he made more money off the contract for the American Idol card game, than he did in 7 years of running his game company.

Mac

Lets take a look at this interview: Ubisoft CEO Guillemot

Having been though this many times, I’m sure the CEO of Ubisoft made a great deal for the rights to Avatar.  Het sent a meno to his head of production informing him of the great rights he has secured, and that the game must come out the same day as the movie.  His next act was to order lunch.

I have seen these deals done correctly, and I have seem them down stupidly.  I worked on “Sahara” at TKO Software. The CEO signed a contract to publish the game in 9 months, with no engine written. The script had almost weekly changes and that made it impossible to put a serious schedule together.  We took the wrong route with the game.

When I was at SEGA I was the producer on Taz for the Game Gear. I was lucky to be under the guidance of the producer of the Genesis version, Scott Berfield. Scott realized that to make a good Taz game, he had to use the art and themes of the show, but not the exact scenes.  This may have come about due to the fact that Taz was a weekly show, at the time, and there were just too many scenes and they weren’t all connected anyway.  For whatever reason, this worked out well. 

Games from movies fall into two categories: 

   1 – Follow the movies exactly (Sahara)
   2 – Use the characters and theme’s from the movie (Taz)

Given the usual shortness of the time between contract signing and movie release, option 2 is usually the best route. The obstacles are the upper management who think games have to follow the movie exactly, and the original licensor who doesn’t want you messing with their characters.  You have to get past them. If you don’t, you’ll end up with games like Avatar, or The Hulk, or Iron Man… or… I could go on and on.

Here’s the secret:

Design a game using the characters and themes that has a development time significantly less than the time alloted.  With additional features listed as “Time Allowed”.   I have been in these meetings, showing the product plan to upper management.  When theysee what they can get IF they give you time, they’ll give you the time.  If they’re happy with the original design, you’re making a game thats fun and will hit the dates. Either way its a win-win.

Can you name a game based on a movie that you liked?

Mac

I started it because I wanted to be able to clarify the games I was reviewing and judging as submissions.  I wanted to spot trends and use the chart to see what areas of game deisgn were being neglected.

As I said above, “I started it”, and its not close to complete.  But Rome wasn’t built in a day and this chart will take some time.  So please, add to the, or argue with where I put the various elements.

Please visit the site, and offer new elements.

Go for it…  Chart of Game Elements