Postmortems From Game Developers

INTRODUCTIONxipart of the industry, rather than a symptom ofproject mismanagement.As an industry, we are gradually becomingaware of this. Grim experience tells us that nomatter how good your idea or how brilliant anddedicated your team, project mismanagementcan wreck things. Project management is a complexsubject worth studying—a collection ofskills and knowledge as difficult and importantto game production as art, programming, anddesign. While it is generally becoming acceptedthat the simple “waterfall” model of softwaredevelopment isn’t enough, flexible developmentmodels are harder to implement than they look,and require daily courage, patience, and goodjudgment.What this book hopes to do is speed up thegame industry’s shakedown process. The postmortemsin this book are the next best thing toactual game development experience. They followprojects from start to finish, talking aboutmistakes as well as good decisions, giving candidaccounts, rather than just trying to abstractgeneral guidelines. They record the experiencesof average game developers as well as highrankingproducers.Each article is written in the same simple format.A member of the development team writesdown how the game got made, starting from theinitial vision and the starting goals, what kind ofcompany and project team was involved, whattools were used, and any major events along theway. The author then lists five successes, fivethings that Went Right and conspicuously contributedto the project’s success. This is followedby What Went Wrong, a list of five misjudgments,failures, or missed opportunities.The postmortems in this book are grouped intofive sections:• Startups,• Sequels and Sophomore Outings,• Managing Innovation,• Building on a License, and• The Online Frontier.These categories are designed to group games byfactors relevant to production, rather than (forinstance) gameplay or technology issues. Theydon’t function with true Aristotelian purity,however, so some of the postmortems concerngames that belong to more than one category—someof the online games were also madeby startup companies, and so on.The Game Developer postmortems have graduallybecome an industry institution, and deservedlyso. The honesty, thoroughness, andspecificity of these accounts make them a uniqueresource. One of the great strengths of the gameindustry is its ethic of cooperation and communication,and the belief that our identity as acommunity of passionate creators is moreimportant than edging each other out for moremoney. This has created an atmosphere wherewe can share information about our successesand failures and help each other make bettergames.This is part of the reason that games as amedium has come so far, so fast. This book will,I hope, be a part of that process, the candidexchange of experiences as we all struggle upthe learning curve together.