[MUD-Dev] Retention without Addiction?

[Lars Duening]

Amanda Walker wrote:

> Daniel.Harman at barclayscapital.com
> <Daniel.Harman at barclayscapital.com> wrote:

>> The 'its ready when its ready' philosophy seems to lie behind a
>> lot of the great games. Is it possible with MMORPG style budgets?

> My experience in other industry segments is probably going to show
> here, but "its ready when its ready" usually means you don't have
> a well-managed software development process.

Yes and no: seemingly little unexpected problems can turn into major
roadblocks - not just when you're working at the bleeding edge, but
also in 'normal' developments.

But in general you're right: planned development of software
projects is tricky, but can be done.

> To be fair, a lot of game development research is done on the fly
> during game development, since game development technology is
> still pretty young.  But I think there's a reason that projects
> have trouble getting funding with business plans that say "we
> don't know how long it'll take, how much it'll cost, how much
> it'll make, or even whether or not anyone will like it."

Gamasutra recently had an interesting weblecture about 'Method' - an
approach to developing games. The idea is to split the development
into 'Pre-Production' and 'Production': Pre-Production is a
relatively open phase during which the team explores game ideas,
research new techniques etc. Once the team has all the key
technologies in place (signified by a playable mini version of the
game), the development enters the strictly planned production
phase. One keypoint to 'Method' is that the publisher or the team
have the possibility to cancel the project if during Pre-Production
it turns out to be technically too difficult, too expensive to
produce, or just not good enough.

In a way it's saying "I don't know how much it'll cost, or how long
it'll take, but if you finance us for two years, we can tell you."

--
Lars Duening; lars at bearnip.com
GPG Key: http://www.bearnip.com/lars/lars-duening.gpgkey

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