Reference: Clinton Keith, Agile Game Development with Scrum, Chapter 7.
How do we match up a phase-less agile process with the needs of a game development project, which has distinct stages, such as pre-production and production?
- Concept
- Concept development is almost purely iterative. Ideas are generated, possibly prototyped, and thrown away on a regular basis.
- Pre-production
- Teams explore what is fun and how they are going to build assets to support it during production. They also create levels and other assets that represent production quality. This stage is fully iterative and incremental.
- Production
- The team focuses on creating an eight- to twelve- hour experience using the core mechanics and processes discovered during pre-production. This stage focuses on efficiency and incremental improvements.
- Post-production
- With the content brought to shippable quality, the team focuses on polishing the whole game experience. This stage improves the game incrementally. Following this, the game is submitted to hardware testing.
Mapping the Development Stages to Scrum
Scrum can be adapted to incorporate the game development projects stages into a series of releases that gradually transition from the concept development all the way to post-production. With each release, the level of technical and requirements uncertainty is gradually reduced:
- Concept
- Sprints are shorter, and most of the stories in the very small backlog are spikes. The main goal of the conceptual stage is to create knowledge for the team and stakeholders, not value for the consumers.
- Pre-production
- Scrum is used to discover the fun of the game and incrementally and iteratively build value and knowledge about production costs. Development is paced by sprints and releases. Release goals are major features.
- Production
- Teams produce assets that were identified in pre-production and incrementally improve the asset pipelines. Although sprints and releases are still used, the pace of asset production becomes the metric for measuring velocity.
- Post-production
- Teams focus on tuning, polishing, and bug fixing tasks they identify daily. Post-production starts on the alpha date and includes the beta and shipping dates.