Hello everyone!
Welcome to our bi-weekly developers log, in which we will give some insight into the weal and woe of our studio and the road to creating our first mobile game, Henry the Cloud. For our first Devlog >.
Scope Creeping:
Most people would say that creating a scroller-like arcade game is pretty straightforward, and that was exactly our thought when we first came up with Henry the Cloud. With the core mechanics being as simple as they are, there was no reason creating this game would ever take longer than a month or two, right? ...Right.
In all our enthusiasm and lack of experience, we experienced a serious case of scope creep. Despite having some background in project management and recognizing the importance of good requirements engineering and documentation, we failed to create one requirements document and stick with it.
As a result, what started as a fast-track project with a very low time-to-market ended up taking us over a year. Since this was a side-project for all of us, we were inspired by several minimalist games with extremely simple core mechanics, little to no side-features and possibly even very rough graphics. However, thanks to our endless stream of “cool ideas that wouldn’t take long to implement anyway” and perfectionism in implementing these ideas, our scope ended up being that of a full-fledged game.
Examples of this are found everywhere in Henry the Cloud. We wanted to offer some competitive element, so we decided to create leaderboards. But wouldn’t it be nice to also offer Facebook integration so you can compare your score with your friends? Absolutely. We also wanted to give the player some incentive to keep playing, so what better way to provide item upgrades that boost your character. And what if you could see these upgrades in-game and on the leaderboards, so you can show off to all your friends how awesome your gear is? Before we knew it, we had created over a thousand unique Henry sprites ... by hand!
The list goes on: give animate objects animations, create neat menus for everything, add statistics, create an awesome website, place banners in the map that can be picked up in to wear as vanity items, add a slot machine, allow the player to add extra powerups ingame, make a gameplay trailer... We could go on forever.
Scope creeping is generally considered harmful, but that really depends on what resources limit you and what your goals are. For us, it made our game evolve from a quick’n’dirty sidescroller to a full-fledged game that we are proud of. None of us had to live off this project so there were no immediate (tangible) costs associated, other than perhaps opportunity cost. This was more acceptable to us than launching a game that was not complete in our eyes. It was also a very educational experience, teaching us more than one life lesson and costing us more than one grey hair.
All in all, we definitely dropped the ball when it came to creating a proper project plan. We just went with the flow, and in our situation that was acceptable. However, for most indie devs trying to live off their games, it isn’t acceptable. At all. If you want to prevent this happening to you, make sure that you have a solid project plan before starting anything. You can be agile in your approach, but make sure that you have defined scope, deliverables, goals, resources and requirements, and stick with them. There are always unknown factors and things that you think of later in the process, but make sure you plan room for them beforehand, and clearly define limits on expansion of your scope.
Alas, you live and you learn. Next time, we’ll be sure to more concretely scope the project - and stick with it. That’s for sure.
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Stay tuned for our next dev log: April 14!
