Game Development and Production (Wordware Game Developer's Library) Review

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(More customer reviews)Eric Bethke gives us the actual battle-tested techniques his team uses to develop games. Most of his wisdom I completely agree with, and he makes some points that had not occurred to me that I will have to think long and hard about. His central, recurring "less is more" thesis is persuasively argued. He has confirmed my suspicion that we may have to rethink our plan for the current game we're working on. I recommend everybody in game development read this book and take it either as a springboard for developing their own methodology or as a sounding board on the quality of their methodology, if one is already in place.
So why only four stars? I have the feeling that Erik isn't being completely honest with us. On my team chaos is the norm even though we scored an AA on Erik's "Game Project Survival Test." Erik makes his team sound like a smoothly running factory, and I have trouble believing it's due to those extra ten points his team is getting on the test. Give it up, Erik: either admit that business is chaos and let us reconcile ourselves to that cold truth, or tell us the deep dark secrets that makes your team work so well.
Also, stuff is missing here: how do you hire great talent? How do you prevent your team from breaking the build on a regular basis without slowing them to a crawl? (That's the question that has been keeping me up nights.) How can you be productive if you're waiting until alpha to fix all your bugs? I bet Erik has some insight into these questions, but he didn't get it on the page.
Still, don't let my nitpicking stop you from reading this book. I'm going to try to make everyone on my team read it. And I'll be eagerly awaiting a sequel.

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Writing comprehensive design documents, accurately estimating tasks and schedules, setting up a comprehensive QA plan—these are all important aspects of the game development process that are often underplanned. Game company executive Erik Bethke provides a guidebook that discusses these issues, along with detailed coverage of development methods and project management techniques, all from the perspective of someone who has learned the hard way and is still learning. * Find out about every aspect of game development and production from concept on a napkin, through development, release, and beyond into patches and point-releases. * Understand the challenges that game developers face in producing successful game titles. * Learn how to define the key elements and requirements of a game. * Discover how to create and maintain schedules using Gantt charts and resource usage charts. * Learn how to use Unified Modeling Language to improve the efficiency of your game development process. * Develop an understanding of how intimately your business parameters affect your game designs. * Explore strategies for landing a job in the game industry. * Find out about outsourcing different parts of game production, such as motion capture, music, voice, and sound effects.On the CD: The companion CD contains three tools that are useful in the production and development of your games: Perforce, an asset and source code control system; Daily Journal, a simple task tracking applet developed and used at Taldren; and Describe, a UML code generation tool.

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