Game Development Consulting
Solve The Dysfunction
Helping teams become their best in order to make successful games
Making Video Games Has Always Been An Unsolved Riddle
The nature of video game development provides for a unique challenge that most industries do not face. In order to know what the product will be, the product has to go through the actual process of being made. The problem space and requirements surrounding the project is unknown. The only way to discover them is through iteration and experimentation in working software. This creates a very difficult set of obstacles to manage.
What to Make
Games usually spawn from simple ideas. And while iteration is the best way to test these ideas, there is no way to know what the game will become and everything it will need until deep into the project.
Hard to Focus
With many design decisions unknow until deep into the project, and many dependencies relying upon these decision, this creates a scenario where much of the team doesn't know where to effectively focus their efforts.
Difficult to Predict
It's incredibly difficult to scope and manage the schedule in an efficient manner that can allow for accurate predictions. Even the most experienced studios suffer from this problem.
Innefficent
All of these obstacles lead to a lot of mis-managed time and effort over the course of the project. Dates begin to slip, then crunch needs to happen as a correcting mechanism, resutling in bloated development costs.
As an industry, we have survived the last several decades using a set of processes and concepts that were never fit for purpose.
In order to bring down costs and continue to survive, we have to recognize this and solve for the dysfunction that has always been present.
The danger was a looming storm coming over the horizon, and it is now upon us. A dangerous Mobius loop where the consumers expectations has forced the sales price of games to rise, which then in turn increases consumers expectations.
With the price of games and console hardware skyrocketing, consumers are demanding more value out of their purchases. This inevitably drives up development requirements, costs, and time. When the load on a system becomes hyper-stressed, every flaw and inefficiency is exacerbated and becomes detrimental to the outcome.