Project Management Research - What can kill a project?

Project Management.

How do you plan a game effectively?

Now that the reasons for indie development have been explored the next stage is to look at how developers plan their projects. This section will look at the problems can be encountered during the process of creating a game and how could they be prevented. It will also explore different ways of creating the plan and the advantages or disadvantages of each. This will then be used to create an effective plan for the next stage of the project, which ideally is to have a working demo of the game that can be used for feedback.

Early planning

‘’most games revolve around a 10-30 second gameplay experience that is repeated endlessly’’ [V4nKw15h 2014]

I don’t really want to use a reddit post for a quote but this really got me thinking about the core loop of gameplay in different games. This quote is effective for games from a lot of eras, everything from pong to dark souls.

Pongs main gameplay loop is definitely on the low end of the scale but it’s very simple loop works well. This is because it’s key element of 2 players attempting to score against each other is driven by a competitive aspect, which uses its small loop to always make one player have to react to the balls direction to block it.

In contrast to this Dark soul’s gameplay loop is a lot more complicated and revolves around a single player defending and attacking with a target. A lot of the fighting in dark souls generally swaps between these two gameplay components using visual ques, like playing a specific animation or sound. The player continually loops between these two elements to create a constant sense of tension whilst they wait for an opening to defeat the enemy. A great example of the looping aspect of this for Dark souls would be how all bosses have a few different attacks that cycle randomly, these attacks will generally have a visual indicator to tell the player they have a choice in how they want to react. Once a player is familiar with these attack patterns they learn how each one loops into the next one, which leads to them knowing when to attack to defeat the boss.

This premise is a key part of creating a good project. If you can get the core loop to be fun, then the game as a great baseline to work with when adding more features and gameplay aspects.  It also reveals some advantages of working out the core features and building an early prototype to test them out. To show this, imagine spending several months working towards creating a game, thinking up every single aspect of it down to the minute details, then starting the creation of the actual game once this is all done. The game’s core gameplay could actually turn out to be really boring or unfun and the whole project has wasted months of time. Furthermore, if they had prototyped early the gameplay could have been reworked into a more fun experience to create a solid foundation for the rest of the project.

In personal experience, during which a few friends and I created a small company of 6 people to try to create a game in a year, this was what I think caused that game to fail. During the first few months all we focused on was planning and concepting a lot of the game, while doing this our programmer was busy making the gameplay work. That is where we encountered the problems, first off only the programmer was testing the game for a large period of time so he got into a state where he couldn’t tell if it was good or not early on. Everyone else on the team didn’t test the game till 3 months in and when it turned out that the game was not fun at that time we decided that it was because of there not being enough content (This mentality continued for the rest of development). What we should have done was go back and redesign the fundamentals of the game and test until we got something that was considered fun.

‘’The challenge of making a game is something like trying to build a house blindfolded’’ [Ryan Benno of Insomniac games 2016]

This is a nice quote for explaining the idea of creating the proof of concept and testing the idea. In building a skyscraper they might run simulations or create scale models to test aspects of the design and highlight any problems. Why should creating a game be any different?

Managing a project

There are a few ways to work out how you want to manage a game project. The most common way of planning a project is with the use of a game design document or design bible for your game. This document will hold all the information on how everything is going to work and the key design aspects of the project. The idea behind it is to make it easy for teams to find any information easily in one place.

The advantages of a game design document are the fact of being able to keep everyone on the same stage of production, it is a great resource for finding information that could be used for marketing and helping to organize a games development by showing how all the aspects of design fit together. Finally, if any problems or design blocks appear, the document will explain how any part of the game should work. All of these benefits look towards keeping a team organized properly and stops people getting lost in the amount of work needed.

It does have some major drawbacks though.

Firstly, it will always be out of date. This is because of the constant progression of a project in any aspect. Any time these aspects are changed the document has to be updates to make everyone aware of the changes, this could potentially waste a lot of time. Also in the early stages, it falls under the problems mentioned in the theoretical project that was being planned for months, it is all based off assumptions and ideas. Furthermore, because of the sheer size of a game design document nobody will bother to read them. Nobody wants to sit through a 50,000 word document about each aspect of the game, it is a big waste of time and most of it will be unnecessary to read if there is prototypes of the project showing what is described in the document.

Finally, it will stifle creativity in how designing a game is approached. These documents are designed to show each detail of the game and don’t allow for interpretation. This can basically kill creativity and motivation when all that designers are allowed to do is follow the steps outlined in the document. Obviously, aspects of them can be changed if a new idea is created but this leads back to the problem of it requiring to be updated again, taking time away from the creative part of the design.

In summary, this looks to be a great way to keep a large team working at the same stage of the game without straying off the path that the producers desire. For a small developer, it could get overwhelming, since it needs constant updating someone on the team is going to have to lose time on other design works to concentrate on updating it (even if nobody bothers to read it). In personal experience the design document was never read by anyone other than the designer because of the small timeframe. Also, after the first month the document stopped getting updated because of these two reasons and because it was taking up a lot of the time the designer was needing for level creation.

Creating a game design document is the only formal way to plan out a project in the games industry and its advantages for keeping a group of people in the same page of a project is clear. On the other hand, there are a few websites used to aid in planning developing a game, trello and Hank’nPlan are great examples of this, they are also known as roadmaps. Trello is widely used to show the development stages of each aspect of a project. Epic (the creators of the unreal engine) use it as a way to plan out new aspect that they want to add to their engine.

[https://trello.com/b/gHooNW9I/ue4-roadmap]

This way of planning is a lot more open, compared to a game design document, in the way it formats idea generation because the board can be actively changed on the fly quickly to show new ideas and changes to old ones. For example, on Epic’s trello board they use a set of columns to manage different aspects they want to add to the engine. In each of these columns is widgets that show what they want to do and in turn these are colour coded based on what stage each of them are at. This is another advantage of this method, because it improves how quickly someone can look at how certain aspects are advancing or if someone is having problems creating something in the project.

This more open method does have its own set of problems though, for one if it is not managed properly it can get really hard to work out what is going on. For example, on epic’s trello if they didn’t give everything categories to fall under the whole plan would be one giant mess of widgets to scroll down or if people were not updating when aspects are complete others would get confused about the state of the project.

Keeping a project progressing

Whilst researching the planning of a project I came across some information on other problems that can kill a project that are not based solely on creating a bad project. Passion and motivation are two aspects that can make or break the creation of a project. Everyone can decide to begin creating a project but only those with the passion for their chosen field will ever actually finish it.

‘’If you want to become significantly better at anything, you have to fall in love with the process of doing it’’ [James Clear 2016]

The quote is from someone talking about finding a passion for working out but it is still true for any other form of creativity. He goes on to talk about how even if you’re born with the talent or physique if you don’t ‘’fall in love with the boredom’’ of the day to day routine then you will ultimately fail. [James Clear 2016]

Since passion is a reflection of a person’s drive towards a certain vocation, motivation is the dedication to finish what they started. Motivation is a fickler part of a person’s emotional drive towards creating a project because it can be killed off by certain things happening during the life cycle of a project.

The developer Bam bu talks about ‘’the grind’’ and it being one of the most challenging parts of keeping work rolling forwards.  They identify a few obstacles that can kill motivation and why they avoid these obstacles. Originality is something extremely difficult in this day and age, with all the media out there it is hard to not have influences in creativity. Trying to create something truly original can stop the momentum of a project completely which will result in a reduction in motivation or kill it entirely. Instead of fighting originality, bam bu decide to embrace the idea of cliché and use it to tell their stories and reflect their ideas clearly.

Perfection can be another problem in this regard too. The idea thah anything an artist creates can be improved in some sort of way can slow down the creation of assets. Firstly, they could get into a loop of adding more and more to that one aspect, which kills momentum and could create a lot of frustration with being stuck trying to get it perfect. Bam bu combats this by deciding when they settle with an idea they stick with it. Even if there might be better ideas "if we let new ideas derail our progress we will never finish anything we start" [Bam bu 2012]

This mentality is great for keeping a project moving forward and if later on in the project the idea is not working anymore then it can still be changed, but at least something was finished for testing in the first place.

Conclusion

There is a lot to think about in how to approach the planning of a project. Personally, I think the creation of a game design document is a big waste of time as a one-man team because I would already be aware of everything that’s happening in the project. Even a small team doesn’t need one if they are effective at managing an alternative method. I also found motivation and passion to be about making sure what you create is something you have an interest in. If you hate puzzle games why would you ever make one, it will kill your motivation quickly and the passion isn't there to put you back on the warpath. Another main point I found from this research that kept popping up in everywhere is playtest, playtest, playtest. If the game stops being fun, then something needs to change. You will never be aware of that fact if nobody plays it.

References

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Clear, James. "How To Fall In Love With The Process To Stay Focused & Motivated". Social. N.p., 2016. Web. 8 Nov. 2016.

Freeman, Tzvi. "Creating A Great Design Document". Gamasutra.com. N.p., 2016. Web. 8 Nov. 2016.

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"How Passion And Motivation Can Help Your Career | Bookboon Blog". Bookboon.com. N.p., 2016. Web. 8 Nov. 2016.

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"My Tips On How To Plan A Game, Stay Motivated And Get It Finished. • /R/Gamedev". reddit. N.p., 2016. Web. 6 Nov. 2016.

Rogers, Scott. Level Up!. Hoboken: Wiley, 2014. Print.

Rogers, Tyler. "Game Development Is Hard, This Is Why - Peripheral Labs". Peripheral Labs. N.p., 2016. Web. 6 Nov. 2016.

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Schultz, Warren. "9 Steps To Planning A Game Development Project". About.com Money. N.p., 2016. Web. 6 Nov. 2016.

Sweatman, James. "Death Of The Game Design Document". Develop-online.net. N.p., 2016. Web. 8 Nov. 2016.