Fix My Bugs

Where do artists and designers go at the very early stages of a project, when they’re creating designs for a new game?

As the plans and designs for a new project are being drawn up, the programmers are still hard at work on the tail end of their current project, which will be the testing (QA) phase.  This is usually when programmers (or the lead programmer)  have the least spare time to cast their technical eyes over new designs or game proposals.

Off go the creative fellows, gambolling in the forests of unconstrained functionality.  The iPhone seems to have a particularly lush and thick forest, populated with accelerometer trees, gesture recognition glades, multi-touch creeks and camera roll clearings.  If you know you’re the technical lead on an upcoming project, make sure you keep an eye on what’s being promised to your clients and publishers.  New and innovative features may make a game stand out, but they’re going to be high risk and time consuming.  If you read a design document two months into the development cycle, as you sit down to implement a feature for your new game, only to discover what you thought would take 3 days requires gesture recognition and motion detection (and there’s no money for 3rd party libraries), you’ve only got yourself to blame!

Thanks to Fergus McNeill for the awesome poster.