Comments on: Fundamentals of Game Project Duration Estimation

By: Juuso - Game Producer

Juuso - Game Producer — Sun, 09 Apr 2006 18:14:11 +0000

@Fernando: Yes, I also believe that agile development methods are great (used those), but if your planning timeline is only the next 2 weeks, it’s impossible (in my opinion) to run business. You just cannot ‘do things forever’ (‘when it’s done’ ;) if there’s money involved. You have to know – or have some kind of estimation – about when then game is done & when the games starts to sell.

But as you said – agile methods are good for many indie projects.

By: Fernando De La Cruz

Fernando De La Cruz — Sat, 08 Apr 2006 22:49:19 +0000

For indie projects I think the Agile methodologies works very well. The last project I worked on, we adopted parts of several methods including Agile Development, Scrum, and Xtreme Programming.

This was a great benefit to the team because we only planned out features that were going to be implemented into the game over the next iteration(2 weeks). By planning things out in short iterations we gained two serious benefits.

- We did not have to worry about cutting features that have been planned for hours during the pre-production phase. Planning takes place every two weeks – so – we only needed to take on the tasks we felt comfortable with for that time period.

- After a few iterations, you can begin to predict how much work can be done within one iteration. This allowed us to predict how much work would be done based on how well the team performed the previous iteration(s).

By: mahlzeit

mahlzeit — Fri, 31 Mar 2006 13:56:23 +0000

Actual time spent = worst case time estimate * 3. ;)

By: Jake Birkett

Jake Birkett — Fri, 31 Mar 2006 09:58:07 +0000

well I had two deadlines for my last two games, Christmas (for Xmas Bonus) and Easter (for Easter Bonus). I needed to get everything ready at least a month before so the portals could wrap it in time. So I had to plan the work, assign estimates, and then decide what to cut out of the plan! I kept a very accurate timelog in Excel which includes time started, time ended, task type, and comment, plus a total time for the task calculated from the started and ended times. This information is all summarised on a different page. For Easter Bonus 10% of my time was writing emails to the artist and musician!! Anyway, I’ll release the time stats if Indiepath releases the sales figures in a few months.

Before making games , I wrote business software for 9 years, you can’t have fuzzy deadlines or feature creep when a paying customer is expecting delivery on a certain date, and hotels are booked, staff are ready and waiting for training etc.

By: Dan Marshall

Dan Marshall — Fri, 31 Mar 2006 09:31:37 +0000

Annoying adage, but “When it’s done” works for me…

By: Mike

Mike — Fri, 31 Mar 2006 08:21:51 +0000

The only estimates I do are these:
Release first playable version – 1 year
Finish the game – Another 1 year
Total 2 years to make a good game.

By: Ville

Ville — Fri, 31 Mar 2006 05:11:41 +0000

I’ve never bothered with time estimates in my indie projects. I could never keep up to them because I never know when I have time to develop the game. Much less pressure this way.