Game Development: About Risk Assessment

Anything we do involves some amount of risk, and the decisions we made about anything should be made with a careful assessment of the risks we are assuming when taking a certain course of action. Game development is full of decisions to be made, and therefore it is also full of risks that we must [...]

Development Anti-Pattern: Neverending Crunch Time

Crunch time is a somewhat unavoidable part of game development, and most experienced developers know that they will enter crunch mode at one point or another. When crunch mode is done for too long or too often, however, a larger problem may very well exist. Symptoms: The team is doing overtime routinely. Little or none [...]

Development Anti-Pattern: Bag o’Bugs

Bugs will always exist, even when the code is well written and tested, you ought to have some bugs. This anti-pattern arises when you are having too many bugs, up to the point of not being able to cope with them at all. Of all the anti-patterns, this is the one that carries the most [...]

Development Anti-Pattern: Loss of Aim

Sometimes developers have doubts about what a feature should do, sometimes the design document is a bit hard to follow. When these problems are taken to an extreme, the team becomes lost and what’s being developed loses connection with the designer’s ideas, often ruining a good concept and failing to deliver the proposed game as [...]

Game Development Series: Anti Patterns

As of today I have accumulated a bit over 4 years of direct game development experience in three different companies and seven different games. At this point in my career, some things are starting to appear as patterns in my head, attitudes and situations that seem to repeat themselves from company to company. My aim [...]

Optimizing the Artists

Working on flash game development has taught me a couple of things so far. The most important one was certainly the importance of teamwork, and of how it can influence the quality of the product in all aspects. When I mean all aspects I do mean ALL, so performance does not escape this premise. Not [...]