About the Book
While the full title for the book, Distributed Game Development: Harnessing Global Talent to Create Winning Games may be long, the point is simple. This book is a lively discussion of how to use a distributed, multi-team approach to build killer games that will thrill your audience and help make a lot of money for everyone involved. Hit games are seldom built by just one team anymore. Organizing and collaboration between co-developers is a tricky, quickly evolving field. The difference between knowing some best practices and just winging it can result in either great games that are on time, on budget, and to quality, or late, expensive stinkers that sink straight to the bargain bin.
“There are dozens of reasons why different teams find themselves using a distributed model. It can be a load-balancing technique for larger companies that need to find work for their teams temporarily between production phases. Or maybe there are possible synergies to exploit between different teams using similar technology. Alternately, distributed development can be a great way to allow smaller companies to avoid the burden of carrying too many full-time staffers. Any time you’ve got a project that is meant to hit store shelves simultaneously across several different platforms (Xbox360, iPhone, PS3, PC, PSP, Nintendo DS, and so on), you’re likely to need some level of distributed development.”
Topics Covered:
- Games Development Cycle
- Concept Phase
- Pre-Production
- Full Production
- Handling Demos
- Alpha, Beta, Final
- Organization of Key Players: Developers, Publishers, Customers, and Retailers
- Digital Distribution
- What to Do with the Wii?
- Key Roles and How to Identify Good Candidates
- Where to Find Candidates and Teams
- How Developers Can Find Partners and Publishers
- How Developers Should Evaluate a Development Deal
- Royalties
- Defining Project Parameters: Scheduling Goals, Techniques,and Milestones
- How to Deal with Multiple Platforms
- Devising Collaborative Schedules: Scheduling from the Ground Up
- Using Source Control across Multiple Sites and Teams
- Establishing and Maintaining Trust Among Teams
- How to Deal with Product Goal or Design Changes
- Cross-Pollination
- How to Keep Clients for Recurring Business
And much more…
These chapters are covered in seven chapters, interspersed with thematic interviews from industry leaders.
Why it Will Help You:
“This is a book for project leads or those who hope someday to become project leads. It’s for the executive producer at one of the top publishers – Activision, Microsoft, Electronic Arts, Tencent, Ubisoft, THQ, or similar –who has just finished another game and can’t help but think that there must be a way to bring a little sanity to the process. It’s for the development director helping keep a team alive at a small development studio doing work-for-hire for its publisher. It’s for the art director of an art outsourcing house. It’s for the motion graphics expert at a video production company’s gaming division. It’s for the lead designer trying to ensure that her vision gets properly translated across to even the handheld version. It’s for the marketing product manager who is trying to get a grip on how to help the development team create a more predictable process and a better Metacritic-rated game.
This is also a book for teachers and students. If you are a student of the games business or in an RTF program who wants to understand more about how modern games are built – and how to find your niche in this fascinating, profitable, dizzying industry – I believe you’ll find a lot here. It’s also a book for teachers: My goal is for this book to serve as a backbone textbook for courses on production.
Finally, this is a book for investors. If you are one of the millions of people who owns stock in a company that derives profits (or seeks to) from creating games, then this book will teach you a lot about how games are made and how to evaluate what’s really happening behind the glossy press releases.”
This is also a book for teachers and students. If you are a student of the games business or in an RTF program who wants to understand more about how modern games are built – and how to find your niche in this fascinating, profitable, dizzying industry – I believe you’ll find a lot here. It’s also a book for teachers: My goal is for this book to serve as a backbone textbook for courses on production.
Finally, this is a book for investors. If you are one of the millions of people who owns stock in a company that derives profits (or seeks to) from creating games, then this book will teach you a lot about how games are made and how to evaluate what’s really happening behind the glossy press releases.”