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Writer's pictureZachary Fried

Intro to Production

Updated: Oct 10

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Production is at the heart of game development. During planning, we imagine magic. In pitch prep, we polish magic. But in production, we make magic.


This section of the site focuses on the processes that govern magic making. These processes are designed to keep things moving forward at a predictable and efficient pace.


The processes, systems, and philosophies that drive production on this site pull from the agile project management philosophy. While it’s helpful to read up on agile and scrum, the articles that follow should sufficiently describe the “how-to” well enough that you shouldn’t need much independent research.


I emphasize this site above because there are many, many ways to skin the cat of video game production. Agile is the most common and popular project management philosophy, and it’s the one that I use. If you’ve found something that works better for you, use it.


I’m not a particularly faithful disciple of the agile doctrine, so I treat it more like guidelines than a code. In other words, I simplify and bastardize parts of it to make it work for me. I encourage you to do the same.


Here’s a list of articles in this section:


  • Sprint Overview: an intro to the core scrum mechanic, sprints, which split up your development into manageable segments and encourage nimble development. Start here.

  • Estimating: an overview of a common task sizing system that helps you figure out how long a feature will take to complete.

  • Backlog Management: a guide to the most common task management system in game development.

  • Sprint Planning: a more advanced guide on planning individual sprints. References information from Intro to Sprints, Estimating, and Backlog Management.

  • Milestones: how do we plan larger chunks of work over longer periods of time? Try milestones--multi-month, themed periods of work.

  • Continuous Playtesting: a plea to playtest as much as possible, an argument for its importance, and tactics for maximizing playtest success.

  • Building Industry Connections: a short article discussing the importance of making industry connections to strengthen your ability to one day pitch your game and secure funding.


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