Building video game is difficult. You can find the reason why the video game development is hard on this article. Why the video game development is hard? (ridilabs.net). Today we will discuss how to reduce the difficulty by creating a time plan for the video game development. On this article, we will use Scrum as a software method to build the video game. This article will divide into three major phases: exploration, sprint, and production.
Exploration
On this phase, you should
Step 1-1 Forming a development teams. It consists of: Scrum master, Product Owner, and Development Team. The development team can become programmer, designer, and others.
Step 1-2 Preparing a virtual workspace. My recommendation is
Setup Teams for your collaboration
Setup Github / Azure DevOps to store your development artifact
Step 1-3 Refreshment. On this step, the team should find online course, book, or any tutorial that can make them more productive in term of skills and knowledge.
Step 1-4 Finalizing Game Ideation. On this stage, you refine the game ideation such as game mission statement document and game design document.
Step 1-5 Review the game ideation. On this stage, we will review and revise the game document so that it will reflect the latest features, constraint, and limitation.
Step 1-6 Creating game project plan. On this stage, we will develop game project plan that consists estimation of works and plan of the game development. It should conduct sprint planning for the game development.
Project plan can be displayed as Microsoft Project or X-Mind Project plan
Workitem will be stored in Azure DevOps or Collaboration Todo like a Planner
Workitem is estimated and the priority is already committed
The sprint is committed (how many sprints in this release)
Sprint
On this step, the team will build the feature of the games that we want to build
Step 2-1 Building the prototype - sprint 0
Step 2-2 Building the game features - sprint 1 - Alpha
Step 2-3 Building the game features - Sprint 2 - Beta
Step 2-4 Building the game features - Sprint 3 - Release Candidate
Production
On this step, the team will test and prepare the video game.
Step 3-1 Play testing. Playing together
Step 3-2 Refinement. Improving the video game based on feedback on play testing
Step 3-3 Release.
the video game development is hard, with several reasons
- It combines between arts and engineering. In order to create a good game you should care about the good arts. Although game can be run by ready to use asset, creating unique video game needs unique assets
- it designed to give good interaction and better experience. Therefore, creating good video games needs a good storyline and good mechanic.
- It runs on veriety hardware and software. Therefore, video games need stable enough so that it can run great on any supported platform
The main question is how to reduce the difficulty in video game creation:
Here are some of the tips that you can follow:
- Design a good game so that the game have sufficient interaction, uniquenes, and experience
- Use existing assets and modify the assets based on the idea and design of your game.
- Choose platform that help your team collaborate and productive. You can choose platform that not hard to master and have feasibility to learn
- Do a lot play testing based on your prototypes to improve performance and a lot
- Collect a lot of scripts that help you more productive. Reuse your codes to develop quick games
as a developer you can improve your skills by
- joining a course to understand the basic process of video game development
- creating microgame and try to mod it based on your idea
- exercising the codes and refactor your codes as your reusable scripts