The Serious Art of Designing Fun

I thought I'd share how my project development is coming along. For the project, I've decided to adopt the Scrum development methodology. Having developed games using Waterfall, Scrum, and XP, I feel that Scrum is the best bet based on the following reasons:

1. It's a one man show and Scrum is great for handling small team projects
2. I know my end goal but I expect a lot of changes along the way
3. It lightens the project management side of things
4. There's Scrum management software which will quickly help you chart the project's development and how quickly its converging to its end goal

My project management software of choice is Scrumworks Basic. It's is a free Scrum project management software by Danube (If you're an indie developer, I highly recommend using it. Scrumworks Basic is free, easy-to-use, has fantastic customer support, supports the most critical project management reports, and it enforces the basic tenets of Scrum.
Make sure you understand the fundamentals of the Scrum methodology before diving into it or its user interface and project management process won't make any sense.

Coming back to the original goal of the post, here's a snapshot of its development status:

It looks that my project will take approximately another year to complete assuming I complete it after 15 sprints (my sprint durations are 3 weeks). It's not altogether surprising as I spend a total of 5 hours a week developing the game (I work on the game during my half hour commute to and from work).

In my previous post, I talked about defining the game goal(s) and its topic (see 'The birth of a game design'), this time we'll start talking about defining the game requirements.

Whereas a game's goal(s) and topic only impacts the design, the game requirements have a critical impact on the technical specifications, the design details, and the game content. The requirements that I like to define as early as possible are:

1. The audience
2. The platform
3. The genre
4. The pacing

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As promised, the first part of the Tanktics game design has been published. Please read the Tanktics Design page for the initial high level details about the game I'm developing. I've also included a list of references used.

Better late than never.

I'm taking a short break from my normal design posts to talk about Prince of Persia: Rival Swords (PoP:RS). You can blame this detour on the cold I picked up last Wednesday. The only thing I could focus on during my short bouts of wakefulness was a game. In order to hasten my recovery, I've decided to write a lighter blog entry focused on the brilliant game design that is the Prince of Persia (PoP).

So why am I so impressed? Because it's one of those games that has successfully made the transition from 2D to 3D while preserving the original game mechanics (gaming history is littered with transitions failures - most notably Worms, Pitfall, and Sonic the Hedgehog). Not only has PoP:RS preserved the design elements from the original game, they successfully added additional mechanics that make effective use of the third dimension.

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I tried to connect to the site this morning and discovered that it had gone down! After much panicking, soul searching, and all out debugging, I discovered that DynDns had stopped hosting my URL because the account had expired!

I was aware that DynDns would expire any accounts that had no transactions for at least 30 days. What I didn't expect was that my router would "forget" to update DynDns at least once in the 30 day time limit.

To keep the long story short, I created the account, set-up the URL (again), and made a mental note to log in every 30 days for here on to prevent this from happening again...