Visions Update: The Importance of Cow Surfing

Making a game is nothing like playing a game. Anyone who has attempted to develop a game for more than 10 seconds discovers this. Playing games is an often fun escape from reality, where the pressures of your daily life can be left behind. Making a game is a prolonged struggle against a seemingly limitless mountain of work. A true "labour of love" if there every was one.

Few professional games ever get finished, and even less Indie games ever reach completion. Making a game as an "Indie" is not something for those who lack drive, determination, or the ability to operate on small amounts of sleep. The task can be overwhelming and depressing at times. Keeping morale high on an indie game team is a critical element to ensuring that a project reaches release. Oddly enough, one of the best ways to give your development project a boost is to stop developing for awhile.

What am I talking about? I'm talking about play. Game Development is a long process and, if you are like most of us and are doing it with little to no budget (in your spare time), it can seem like an endless struggle. That is why anything that breaks the monotony of it is beneficial. Especially something that makes to take a step back and really appreciate what you have already done.

The idea is called a "test week." Basically, every few weeks (often every 3, so once a month) you schedule a "test" week. Let everyone on your team know in advance and have them plan accordingly. Usually these can correspond with internal project milestones. What you do during a test week is play. Put aside the modeling tools, the design doc, and shut off the code debuggers and just play your game. Get as many people as you can to log in and just have fun. Run around, try things out, be goofy. It's all about letting off some steam, and taking a step back to appreciate how far you've come.
(A group shot from our first test week, with us standing on sheep just to be goofy)


Often when you're developing, you keep looking ahead at all the work yet to be done and that can be depressing. You may not fully appreciate how much work you've already done, so take some time to do that. Then, what follows a test week is a "drive" week. This is something that the team should also know about it advance. A drive week is a mini crunch time where everyone hunkers down and tries to give the game a real shot in the arm. I'm not talking about double hours or anything, but just a "focus" period. Usually what is done during this time is fixing up the bugs and implementing feature suggestions gathered during the test week.

Now, you may be thinking, "But you can't do anything in my game yet, what is there to test?" The answer is: anything! In the early stages of development its not about really testing features its about taking a break. In our last test week for Visions, there wasn't anything to do except run around and look at the world. Everyone has been busy, but from a programming standpoint we don't have any gameplay systems in place just yet. That didn't matter, though. We got a bunch of people logged into the game, we ran around, and did goofy things. We jumped off of buildings and landed on each other. We stood on top of cows and sheep and chickens. Personally, I had been so busy working on an Inventory system I hadn't really stopped and taken a look at what some of our modelers had been doing. Here's a great shot at the Hippodrome in Jerusalem (a mini-coluseum), that I think looks fabulous.


After seeing it, we decided we just had to have a race around the track. Just to be extra goofy we did it in "crawling" position. Thanks to a brilliant hairpin corner move, our lead artist Brian "Pickelking" beat me by half a body length.


The point is: we had a blast. The team bonded, and for some of them it was the first time they had seen where all of their art and programming time was going. A test week can be a fantastic tool for boost morale, bringing your team together, and breaking up the monotony of the development process. So take a step back, appreciate what you have already done, then hit the task list again with a fresh set of optimism and enthusiasm. Perhaps you too will learn the joy of cow surfing.


Happy test week everyone,
Mark

Disclaimer: The idea of the test and drive weeks as presented here was originally suggested to me by Dave Young of Dream Games Inc. I would urge anyone to drop by the Dream Games IRC channel and speak with the guy sometime. In all my conversations with him I have come away encouraged and enlightened.