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 Features
Postmortem: Blue Fang's Zoo Tycoon 2: Marine Mania
 The Right Process…
Marine was a smooth development experience and there are many contributing factors as to why that was so. Certainly our pre-planning efforts deserve a lot of credit, but we also incorporated various processes to help minimize wasted time while ensuring that the team was informed and on the same page.
For the most part, we struck the right balance of meetings. Fortunately, we’re a dynamic enough company that there isn’t a layer of bureaucracy that we need to live by. Since I personally am not a fan of regular team meetings just for the sake of having them, we actually had very few of them during Marine. Of course sometimes there were things that were best communicated to the team all at once, and sometimes we’d have them just for fun… (hey guys, remember the “guac and salsa” meeting?), but not having regular team meetings didn’t mean that keeping everyone in the loop wasn’t essential. A couple tools that were helpful for us were using Wiki pages, our own proprietary tool for task tracking and the warboard.
Ahhh, Wiki. While initially skeptical, I came to be an avid fan of using our Wiki for meeting notes, agendas, to-do lists, and so on. It was a great way to capture information from any computer in our office and made it easy to keep a record of past decisions and track outstanding issues. Want to loop others in? Simple, just send out the link to the Wiki page.
Although production schedules were created and managed using MS Project, we also relied heavily on our own proprietary task tracking tool that we internally refer to as “taskmaster”. It is a browser-based, one-stop shop application used to delegate, clarify and finalize production tasks and it allows everybody involved in the project to communicate or gather information about tasks and stay updated as to the status of every task. It proved extremely useful for everyone from production to management to developers.
We used a centralized and visible warboard to identify and track all the features and content that was slated to be delivered in the current milestone. As we got close to the milestone delivery date, we held quick daily review meetings in front of the warboard to go over the outstanding items. This really helped us deliver features and content with higher quality, prevented issues from slipping through the cracks and helped make sure the workflow kept moving from team member to team member.
We also had practices in place to streamline milestone weeks as much as possible, the idea being of course to mitigate the risk that we’d end up furiously trying to pack up a milestone at midnight or later. We’d branch our source control a few days in advance and establish dates for code and data freezes a little in advance so that we had time to focus on stabilization. It was sometimes hard to say “no” to last minute changes but generally speaking, when we relaxed those policies and let stuff go in late, we paid for it with a more difficult or unstable milestone.
Blue Fang is a vocal advocate of Quality of Life issues in the game industry and these practices are just some of the things that let us live that ideal. I’d be lying if I tried to say we never worked any extra hours because in the end we have a responsibility to deliver quality product. But what we did do was incredibly civilized and every effort was made to respect the lives and needs of the team members.
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