Lean Game Development

Master Lean UX and Lean Startup techniques to improve your agile game development experience beyond Scrum. This updated version of the book focuses on applying lean and agile methodologies to the game development process and features improved examples, applied techniques, and a whole new section explaining how to test a game in Unity with CI.

You'll see how to define a minimum viable product (MVP) for games with Lean Canvas, allowing customers to iterate over it and collect feedback for improvement at every cycle. All of these are achieved while still using standard Agile techniques. The first part of the book explains the ideation process of a game and how lean methodologies allow developers, especially small studios, to avoid scope creep. Next, it it provides guidance on creating MVPs and using player feedback to iterate and improve games. The book then discusses continual improvement (CI) methods. A crucial part of CI is generation of Lean Canvas.

Lean Game Development, Second Edition shows you how to iterate until you develop a game that satisfies developers, gamers, and your studio's financial goals.

WHAT YOU'LL LEARN

* Study lean and agile methodologies to enhance the game development process
* Find out how to improve the way game productions define value and iterate over it
* Apply development strategies to enrich the game development process

WHO THIS BOOK IS FOR

People from all sectors of the gaming industry will find the book useful in planning their project in a more iterative way, unloading the management burden on the development process and collecting feedback to improve the game content as early as possible.

Julia Naomi Rosenfield Boeira has been a software engineer for over a decade, focusing on Game Development and Online Service. Currently, she works as a team lead at Ubisoft; previously she worked as an online engineer. She has also worked with premium agile consultancy companies such as Thoughtworks and is extremely active on GitHub with focus on Game Development and Rust.

Chapter 1: Introduction

Sub –Topics

• Why lean game development, not agile game development?

• How do lean and agile relate to the game world?

• Games and software relate much more deeply.

• What kind of game is software development?

• Where did it go wrong?

• Summary

Chapter 2: First steps with Lean

Sub – Topics

• Seven key principles of lean

• Lean inception

• Lean PMO

• Lean DevOps

• Kanban

• How can you take advantage of Scrum

• Continuous integration

• Going from build-measure-learn to lean game

• Looking deeper at the inception

• Test driven development

• Lean and Games

• Summary

Chapter 3: An Inception in practice

Sub - Topics:

• How and why, we did an Inception

• How was our inception?

• Prioritizing ideas

• Persona development

• Next Steps with lean

• How does the game look like from the inception perspective

• Summary

Chapter 4: Do we really need a MVP

Sub - Topics:

• MVP and MVG Defined

• Building Prototypes

• The Product Owner role in MVP/prototype

• Getting more from less

• Recognizing when a game is not viable

• Thinking simpler first

• From MVP Canvas to Lean Game Development

• MVGs and prototypes of Super Jujuba Sisters

• Summary

Chapter 5: Examples of MVGs

Sub - Topics:

• Guerrilla Games: From Killzone FPS to open world Horizon Zero Dawn

- Conception

- Thunderjaw (core mechanic example)

- Open World

- Vegetation System

- Proof of Concept

- Pre-production

- Production

• Archero: Casual Games as a Great Lean Process

• Dead cells: Quick feedback loop

- Dead cells Core Concept

- Expanding to multiplayer

- Pivoting Tower Defense

- MVP

Chapter 6: Generating Hypothesis

Sub - Topics:

• When hypothesis are not created from the Inception

Chapter 7: Test Driven Deveopment

Sub - Topics:

• TDD defined

• Tests are good, but then why there is so much poorly tested code?

• Applying TDD to games

• Next steps to improve TDD

Chapter 8: Continuous Integration

Sub - Topics:

• Why continuous integration

• Using continuous integration

• Code versioning

• Automated build

• Summary

Chapter 9: The world between Design and Build

Sub - Topics:

• A little bit about Design

• A little bit about Build

• Pretty Beautiful, but how is it done?

• Summary

Chapter 10: Test, Code, Test

Sub - Topics:

• Testing types

• Test cases

• Coding game art work

• Coding the game software

• Test automation

• Summary

Chapter 11: Measuring and Analyzing

Sub - Topics:

• Ways of measuring

• Feedback

• More on feedback

• Other ways of measuring

• Measuring through hypothesis

• Analyzing

• Summary

Chapter 12: Creating ideas for iterating

Sub - Topics:

• Action Items

• The features are OK, but the game is not fun

• The Game is fun but very difficult to play

• Rethink the limitations on Game Development

• Tying things together

• Summary

Chapter 13: Consolidating Knowledge before Expanding

Sub - Topics

• Automated testing

• Agile methodologies

• Art and Iteration process

• Avoiding Time Waste

• Continuous Delivery

• Summary

Chapter 14: More about games

Chapter 15: Example game using Automated testing for game development

Sub - Topics

• Setting up Unity for testing.

• Creating testing scenes and objects

• Setting up a CI for Unity

• Testing Gameplay, how to test character controllers

• More testing scenarios for games

• How to test ECS with Bevy Engine

• Summary