Agile is a set of values for building products, like games, more effectively by balancing planning with reality, delivering features and quality iteratively, while focusing on the emergent fun of the game by adding features and mechanics in a player-value prioritized way. It allows a more responsive and predictable approach to development by balancing planning, art, design, technology and testing within small iterations rather than consigning much of the work in these areas to phases of development (i.e. big planning documents at the start and a flurry of testing and bug fixing at the end.
Scrum is an agile framework with a further focus on the people making a game. Scrum sets up a framework of small cross-discipline teams that take control of the work done in small iterations (2-3 weeks) to achieve a functional goal. There are a number of reasons for doing this:
- Small teams (5-9 people) communicate more effectively than larger groups.
- Cross-discipline teams can respond to the needs of an emerging game (quality and functionality) more quickly.
- Creative developers are more effective and motivated when they have a clear vision of a goal, can take ownership of their work and implement changes day-to-day without being micromanaged.
- Scrum iterations level out workload to be consistent and sustainable throughout development. They do that by balancing design, development, debugging and tuning so that the game doesn’t build an overwhelming debt of undone work that needs to be paid back, with interest, later in a project through death marches and compromises in quality.
Agile Game Development is a set of collected experiences of what works and what doesn’t work with iterative approaches and practices (e.g. Agile, Lean, Scrum, TDD, Kanban, etc) as applied to over a decade of game development with all genres and platforms. Although it may not follow all practices of any single framework, it does adhere to the agile mindset and values.
