Gear Up!

Gear Up! Advanced Game Development Practices  has 15 practices alone on how to improve the effectiveness and productivity of your iterations/sprints. Burndown your PBIs Measure your daily progress adding features into the game Estimate in Days not Hours If hour estimates are too precise, don’t use them Feature Flow Cards Manage workflow on a cross-discipline feature that requires some hand-offs Fix-it Friday Manage debt by setting aside every Friday to fix, polish and fine tune the game Iteration Reviews Celebrate the amazing accomplishments of the team Priority Status Board Create transparency for iteration priorities Sprint Day Review, retrospect and plan the next sprint in a day! Swim Lanes Create, visualize and track a work category for solving urgent requests The "Done Done" Column Elevate the role of quality in your iterations Th...

Often, large groups are hesitant to roll out change. I recently visited a team that releases a large sports title every year. The title always does well in the market, but it comes at the end of months of crunch and compromise. They know it needs to change, but doing something that would cause them to miss their sport's season start would be disastrous. I recommended a practice from Gear Up! Advanced Game Development Practices , called "Beachhead a New Practice", included below. ---- Beachhead a New Practice Most practice improvements are small and incremental, but sometimes bigger, more risky leaps are what is needed. It’s even riskier when you ask the entire studio to make the change at once. Examples of such changes could be: Reseating teams into an open cross-discipline space Adopting unit testing and continuous integration Pairing on all or most of the work Swapping out a major part of an asset production pipeline Beachheading is named after the mi...

By  Grant Shonkwiler Today we read and discuss Roman Voting. This is a quick and fun way to get a feel for what the team is thinking of an idea, or the current project. Check out the video below for the reading! Gear Up! Advanced Game Development Practices

Summary - Some practices are meant to catch problems before they get too far. Don't make the mistake of having these practices humiliate or punish people.  Assume they are human, didn't mean it and have some shared laughs. --- The practices collected in Gear Up! come from decades of experience, some painful, some that turned out fun in the long run. One such practice called “Lighten the Mood” came from the development of Midtown Madness in the late nineties at Angel Studios when we were struggling to keep the game from being continually broken. Often when a commit breaks a game, it's because someone ignored established testing practices.   We didn’t have extensive build testing automation then. We had a dedicated PC, the “build monkey,” where any change committed had to be tested separately following every commit. Verifying the build on the build monkey could be a tedious task. Some people occasionally found excuses to skip it, sometimes to the detriment of the team. ...

By  Grant Shonkwiler Today we read and discuss The Review Bazaar practice. This is an excellent practice for larger teams to show off what they are doing to each other. It's a fun way to show parts of the project in interactive ways as opposed to just showing each other videos. Check out the video below for the reading! Gear Up! Advanced Game Development Practices

By  Grant Shonkwiler Hello again friends, today we read and discuss the Silent Hour practice from Gear Up! This practice has served me well on all types of teams, from small to large, this practice allows for the team to really focus on work for a good hour a day. It's all about providing time for people to enter and stay in flow.  Gear Up! Advanced Game Development Practices

By  Grant Shonkwiler Here we are with another reading of one of the practices. This one is a personal favorite, The Silent Count. I've always struggled with being the person who always has the answer, or thinks they do at least, this can silence people on your team. This practice really helped me to get better at letting others speak and making sure everyone get's to have their voice heard.  Gear Up! Advanced Game Development Practices

By Grant Shonkwiler As soon as we launched the book people started asking for an audio book version, well we aren't ready for that yet, but I'll read one of the practices every few days. Hopefully this satisfies some of those people! I'm a big fan of this practice, it's great for people struggling with meeting fatigue! There are a ton of practices in the book, let me know which ones you want me to read and discuss next!  Gear Up! Advanced Game Development Practices

This is a story about how effective vision for change can be made collaboratively  among leaders.  The practices used are documented in my recently released book (coauthored with Grant Shonkwiler): Gear Up! Advanced Game Development Practices By Clinton Keith I recently visited a studio that had created a new game and was transitioning to live support for it, adding features and content on a regular cadence. They were struggling with establishing roles and process for this transition and although they had strong leadership in place they wanted help coaching the transition. I spent three days with this remarkable group facilitating practices captured in my new book “Gear Up!”.  The first days consisted of learning about them by speaking with individuals.  As an outside coach, the key is to ask questions that are neutral and result in hearing what is important for them to communicate.   Powerful questions (page 76) provides some useful guidelines for th...

Have you ever played a video game?  Have you ever wondered about how complex, challenging and just plain hard it can be to build worlds for a $400 machine?  Consider using agile practices for such teams...how can small teams of artists, musicians, programmers, animators and testers coordinate? Applying agile to game development is hard, but we face the same problems other industries do.  It comes down to the same four agile values and challenges all other agile teams face . It's primarily a people challenge. Video games are relatable.  Everyone is familiar with them.  We all understand the product and the customer goals: find the fun.  This is why I visit companies outside the game industry as an agile trainer.  This is why the book is relevant and applicable to companies outside the game industry as well.  Even though it's about video game development you should find it relatable and fun to read. Have a look at the sample book and decide...

Gear Up launched today! Wow...seven years almost to the day since my first book.   What took so long?  Well, cranking out 250 pages of text, illustrations and doing most of the proofreading on my own took years.  I'm proud of the result, but it was a "check off the bucket list item" thing at the time. This book was different.  First, let's visit its origin. Developers always ask me “we’re having problems doing X with methodology Y, what should we do?”. My first answer is always “What have you tried?”.  I ask this because the best solutions usually come from the people doing the work and experimenting with new practices, not following so-called “best practices”. “Best practices” implies there are none better. Practices will always change as do our players, technology and markets. This leads to experimental practices, where teams explore ways of adapting to change and improving how they work together. Thinking about that original question, I think of al...