The Elusive “Quick Iteration”: Tips for Indie Devs « #AltDevBlogADay

The Elusive “Quick Iteration”: Tips for Indie Devs « #AltDevBlogADay

From agile and scrum to extreme programming, everyone’s trying to nail down what it takes to iterate on products quickly and efficiently. There are a lot of methodologies that you can employ to guide you through shipping products. But today, I’ll be talking specifically about video games and how, as a developer, you can use a loose process and follow some basic rules in order to get quality games quickly out the door. You might argue that in today’s day and age, with the Valves and Blizzards of the world, that taking your time speaks volumes for the quality of a game. Well, yes and no. For big AAA companies with a reserve of cash, that might make sense but as an indie developer you live and die off of shipping. The importance of quality and fun has not changed. However, the games industry is much more accessible and now developers utilizing fast iteration can make ridiculously high quality games in very short amounts of time. It’s one of the few things we can do better than big developers.