Notes from the Inaugural Game Preproduction Class: Draft Schedules

 Last week, my teams presented their draft macro charts. This week, they presented their draft schedules. All of the teams made good progress here. I showed them how to use pivot tables to figure out how many hours they had for each priority level; they could use this for task assignment as well, but none of them had yet gotten into the level of detail required. We had some useful conversations about the relative merits of pairing or mobbing on some tasks while parallelizing others.

One of the groups included four formal playtesting sessions, not for validation of any particular feature but for general feedback. The other two groups recognized that this is valuable for scheduling. This led us to a discussion about the kinds of things that take time that were not yet in their schedules. These are the categories we identified:

• Creating a store presence
• Playtesting
• Organization and administration
• Release engineering
• Community building
• Legal / Business / Tax
• Marketing (posters, handouts, YouTube, release party, shirts)
• Convention travel
• Dealing with contractors

I look forward to see how the students incorporate these into their final schedules. As they work on their schedules, their macros, and their vertical slices, I think they are really coming to understand how many different pieces need to come together for this to work.

As we were wrapping up, one of the students commented that, although he is quite fond of his project, he thinks our best bet would be to kill two of them and all work on one. I consider this a good result, as the student is seeing how much work even one of these projects will require.