Game Developer Magazine: A great resource.

GD: I absolutely love it.

I figured I'd take the time out of my day today to read the magazine I'd decided to evaluate on a lark: Game Developer. I paid I believe $50 to $60 for a year's subscription and it took a little over a month to process, but I got November's issue. This would be the issue whose cover article is Certain Affinity's Age Of Booty. I had previously not heard of this game beforehand and didn't know anything at all about it.

It just so happens that I have recently been re-interested in game development on a serious level and I was re-evaluating Microsoft's XNA Framework. I wanted to make a strategy game (decision is still being held off on whether or not to approach it turn-based or real-time) for the XBox Live Arcade (XBLA) that I've been designing out and want to prototype soon. Well, as I read the first page of the article, and it's source development tools, I soon realized that Certain Affinity had, with a small group of core designers and developers, done exactly what it is that I wanted to do myself, or at least try out. Except they did it with Capcom, a major publisher, as their backer, and their team consisted of experts in the field; veterans, shall we say, of the Game Development Wars that wage ceaselessly. According to GD, they had (in general) 5 full time developers, 9 shared, and 3 part-time contractors to produce 457 source files yielding 117,000 lines of code with only 2,147 bugs reported (either open, resolved or addressed) with a development time of 13 months: 2 months pre-production, 11 months production. They made the XBox 360 version, contracted out the Windows version, and Capcom took on the PS3 version. These are the same people who make Left 4 Dead. This is now a game I'm going to purchase simply to support them. I'll probably have fun and enjoy it quite a bit too, as I'm an RTS fan and I love board games, which this game is inspired from.

Anyways, I wanted to point out that their post-mortem was an excellent resource and covers the essential ideas and processes that I want to implement myself and how I believe the wave of the indie future is going to run for the immediate future.

Anyone who is interested at all in game development should check this magazine out - it's available both online and in print, and I prefer print editions of most resources, but it allows for some serious flexibility if you're on the road a lot and have only your laptop or digitally-enabled mobile phone to accompany you.

Also, an excellent additional resource I enjoyed was their ads. I tend to hate ads in magazines, but the tools they list and the offers they provide were all things I seriously considered - and they tend to be either full page spreads or out of tabbed to the sides or bottoms of pages where they aren't annoying (*cough*websites should do this more and stop inserting weblinks everywhere*cough*) or distract from the main content.

Thanks and I hope you check them out,
Ahad L. Amdani

Stage Gates Revisited: Gate Meetings

The PM Hut (specifically, Dave Nielsen) published an article last week that I feel deserves some special attention. The article can be found here: Conducting Successful Gate Meetings

My comments (visible on the article) have been re-published below:

Dave,

Sorry it took a week for me to approve your comment (I never realize comment moderation was on at my blog). I'm glad you pointed this article out to me - specifically because it made me realize a couple of additional points with regards to stage gates.

Primarily, the gate meetings themselves - why they should be held, and when they should be held during your projects.

The parts dealing with who should attend and how to run the meetings are more political in nature and I feel are different/unique per situation.

> Gate meetings also serve the purpose of validating the Business Case. As the project’s scope, budget, and schedule change throughout its life cycle, your Business Case will change.

Hadn't considered this aspect. I realize that the project evolves, the customers evolve and the business relationship evolves, so we would have to update documentation, but I hadn't considered the need to update the business case for the project. We usually work with technical writers and they take care of this for us - but it's definately something an independant consultant or small team should take into account.

> The Business Case may also be changed by circumstances outside the span of your control such as changes in the market place. The Gate Meeting is your opportunity to have the updated Business Case validated by your project’s executive sponsors.

Yes, another great effect of updating your business case would be its re-validation against the market.

> The second [gate meeting] is critical because this is the meeting where the customer will formally accept the products of the project. It should drive any formal sign offs and final payments that conclude the project.

I've always preached and practiced holding what I now call gate meetings many times over the development cycle of a project, but I don't think I've ever held one before customer sign-off. We had small reviews to ensure whether or not all of the features had been fully completed and tested out, but never to evaluate whether the business case still stood, whether or not to cut the project off or restructure it, etc. I'll have to try it out and see if the sponsors / clients would be interested in changes from what we had originally considered the "final release." I think mostly because since we follow the Stage Gate process, we feel that things are aligned towards a successful completion assuming all coding and functionality are completed for the fully evolved project. But always room to try and it costs no more than a day of work.

The article also goes into the fine points of actually conducting the meetings, deciding who should attend, etc. These are the details that I feel deserve a look at, even though I consider most of these points unique to the situation within a company, because they form good, general advice.

Take care,
Ahad L. Amdani