MMO development (slowly) goes Agile

One of the things that excites me the most about the many, many signs of the so called virtual-worlds and social-gaming markets gaining momentum is that the walls insulating game and web development from each other are slowly coming down.

Susan Wu talked about this on her blog post announcing CRV’s investment in Areae

(oh: Come on, Susan please blog more!! We long for your insights )

One of the desired effects is that game development will look a little less like a movie production (3-year, many millions of dollar development cycles which turn into either a blockbuster success or a bust) and more like web development projects (you know, release fast, release often. Build & leverage and all that).

So it’s great to see Brandon Reinhart, lead designer for Blackstar (one of those upcoming MMOs) talk about his thoughts on design docs. Such as:

“Design docs are great for making plans and scoping projects, so we can’t throw them away entirely, but when you’re telling your buddies — or team mates — about the game, you tell them about it in a story, not a wall of text”

AND

“don’t tell a hundred stories about all the different kinds of blasters in the game, but maybe write ten stories, maybe one about the company that makes the blasters.”

Which is an adaptation of the user-stories concept of agile development and extreme programming to the field of game design.

Personally I have my own set of issues with some aspects of agile development- but I am certainly a big believer in its core principals. One of those is adapting the agile development process to different types of projects. Game design/development is a unique and complex craft so adaptations are certainly required - and I hope Brandon and others will continue in this direction.

Link to Gamasutra article covering Blake’s session: http://gamasutra.com/php-bin/news_index.php?story=18659

or visit Brandon’s blog for more on this.