Credit: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=xPmKNHF84qc
Network Scheduling is very important to release a project on time, whether it be an app, website, or anything else. It helps teams to prioritize what is most important and set up due dates for everything required for the project. PERT charts make it easy to see how every step of the project relates to each other and how long each step will take. GANTT charts are also useful to visualize what parts of the project need to be completed early and how much time each process will take.
Using these tools makes it easy for teams to keep an eye on how well they are progressing through the schedule. They are also extremely useful for finding slack time in case something doesn’t go as planned (it almost feels like the norm in coding). Possibly more important than slack time is finding the critical path, or what processes need to be prioritized to get the product finished on time. If a process is to be waited on for other ones to continue, it is most likely on the ciritcal path and should avoid delay at all costs.
In Indie Game Development, scheduling is very important. There are conventions, release dates, and sales dates that cannot be moved, so whatever the developer has is what they have to show. The company, Those Awesome Guys, specifically Nicolae Berbece, gave a GDC talk about creating their game “Move or Die.” In it he explains that originally his fast paced multiplayer party game started as a single player slow puzzle game, that to this day has not been completed, and probably won’t be. The “Move or Die” game began as a multiplayer minigame option for the single player game, but people loved that way more than the actual puzzle game that he began focusing exclusively on that. He only spent a little time investing in different game engines and libraries before he invested too much time and effort into one. He quickly added a couple people to the project from across the world, but didn’t go into much detail of how they contributed.
Most indie games have an early access where people can get the game early for a discount, bugs, missing content and all. Nicolae also did this, but charged a premium instead of a discount and told people not to buy it to ensure whoever did, REALLY wanted to play it now. After one year of development and getting bug reports from early adopters, he officially released his game at a lowered price which spiked his sales. Most games have a spike in early access and a soft launch, so doing the opposite really paid off. He didn’t just add content without planning though as he released multiple planned free updates. In Nicoale’s eyes there are four important columns for supporting his game: replay-ability, marketing, and content. For each of these columns, he released an update focused specifically on just that. For content, he released a character and level creator. This allowed players to add their own personal touch to the game and made it so he didn’t have to keep creating levels himself. Replay-ability he added mutators, such as falling bombs, slick floors, etc, so every game is different. Marketing was particularly interesting as he integrated Twitch chat to interact with streamers where they could do things such as chose where the mutated bombs should drop and how often they should drop. He also included a store that didn’t accept real world money, only in-game so of course it was called Not-A-Store where you spent Not-Coin. For online he added bots and the ability to use mods in online matches. For content he asked the creators of Discord, Rick and Morty, and other properties if he could use their likeness in the game to add them as official characters. Before doing so he added them to an unreleased test version so they could see that he was being responsible with their IP. I believe everyone gave him approval when seeing this. After the official release he had 105,363 crashes, 106 patches, 338 key requests, and a 44.7% piracy rate. After the first year of updates he had a total of 521,273 players, 240,702 crashes, and a piracy rate of 37.3%.
While Those Awesome Guys didn’t show any official GANT, PERT charts, or anything thing else that we explicitly cover in class, it is very easy to see there was a plan, and these documents could easily be created after seeing his release schedule. Starting with a buggy unfinished game, to patching it, to updates that will later be incorporated by other updates. Along with many patches released
1 Comment
Shaan Badlu · November 11, 2019 at 3:48 am
Nice post Tyler. Definitely important to utilize GANTT and PERT charts for your project. With the example you displayed, it goes to show that if you have a solid plan without showing any of these charts, your project can be a success. It’s definitely important to use some scheduling technique to have that tactical structure for your project because without it, things can be a disaster as noted in your post with the Indie Game example.