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The
Right Decision at the Right Time: Many
of us can certainly relate to the situation when the studio is almost
done with a new game and it's time to think about the next project.
The company management assembles a small team of contributors including
programmers, artists, designers, a project manager, and of course
the studio executives. A brainstorming session is called together
to outline the key features of the upcoming project. Everyone, eager
to share ideas at once, eventually turns the meeting into anarchy.
This scenario usually happens because everyone has their own agenda
and individual priorities. A game designer will fancy an innovative
game mechanism, a programmer will push for some technological breakthrough,
while managers will look for concepts that can sell to publishers
or fit the studio's budget. Then, everyone
has their own pet projects, that one game which is close to their heart
that they would just love to develop. Amidst all the enthusiasm, management
soon finds it very difficult to take a number of contrasting suggestions
and turn them into valid and ideas. An alternative way to work out a project
is to limit the number of contributors. A group of two to three people
from among company management will focus on a small number of personal
ideas, or will concentrate on key imperatives for the studio. Indeed,
this approach will make it easier to define a project, but will the result
be any better? Decision makers, whether in a brainstorming session or
in a limited committee, face the same problem: too many parameters that
must be merged into a single concept. Furthermore, this kind of decision-making
process is not truly motivating to the rank-and-file employees, who are
forced to go with a project without being consulted. The method
presented in this article is designed to foster creativity and build a
consensus. It is by no means a magical formula or turn-key concept, but
rather a decision making aid, used to identify better choices. It helps
select the best project ideas regardless of the number of parameters involved.
This method also makes it easy to establish a consensus around a project,
and more importantly, produce equally good results for large as well as
small teams. 1st stage: Defining goals and getting organized Set the
boundaries The Workgroup The group must include a person knowledgeable in this method, who will guide the team's musings into constructive hypotheses. The size of the group is of little importance. The method discussed is designed to consider everyone's ideas, therefore making it applicable even to even large groups.
2nd stage - Identifying parameters and their values What
is a Parameter? A game project can therefore be defined as a set of parameters, and the values selected for each of them. Choosing parameters and their values is therefore an important step. In the method presented in this article, the first stage is defining such parameters and their associated values. For instance, here are some of the possible parameters that could have been used when creating Alone in the Dark — The New Nightmare:
The Choice
of Parameters
A few comments
are in order, such as:
The Choice
of Values
A few questions
will certainly come up:
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Introduction
Features
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