[arg_discuss] How long is your dev cycle?

[Jennifer Nicole Chiment]

I’m curious about this as well since it does seem to be a recurring theme
in pm discussions.

Personally, I think the “ideal dev timeline” is going to rely heavily on
the experience and backgrounds of the pm team.  I think that 3-4 months
would be a perfectly comfortable timeline for an experienced team, but
that a team made up of rookie pm’s might need  a significantly longer
pre-launch pahse and that they might still discover problems post-launch
that they should have caught (and handled) during development.

Lockjaw and Project_MU are good examples of this.  Lockjaw had a loooong,
gradual, and ever shifting development phase as potential puppetmasters
came and went, character personailities and affiliations changed (for
example, pre-9/11 there was a “shadowy religious group”, post-9/11 there
was a “shadowy biotech group”).  Despite this never ending development
phase we still launched the game only a half step ahead of the players and
without a clear picture of where the game was going to go (well, I didn’t
know where we were going...other pm’s might have had more coffee).  I
don’t think a longer dev phase would have helped, it was simply the “new
pm learning curve”.

Project_MU on the other hand had a cleaner/quicker dev timeline and we
knew well before launch where we wanted the players to go and how we
thought they’d get there, what plot arcs needed to intersect at what
points, and key concepts we wanted the players to “get” at specific
stages.  And more importantly we were confident that we could get the
players from point A to point B on time and in one piece.  Again, it
wasn’t so much the amount of time spent in development but the familiarity
of the pm team with the arg format and with each other’s abilities.

So at least at the grassroots level I think the collective “behind the
curtain” experience of the pm team is going to be the deciding factor on
how much time should be spent on pre-launch development.  Have they worked
together before or do they all have pm experience?  What
technical/theatrical/literary skills do the pm’s have and do they know
what their fellow pm’s can do?  Are they geographically diverse enough so
that they can respond to the game 24 hours a day without killing
themselves or will they need to prep additional, alternate, material in
advance to maintain a quick response time?  Can they play euchre and read
l33t?  :)

But what do people think?  Is there a bare minimum people would be willing
to run with (6 weeks?!?)?  And is there a point of developmental
diminishing returns (personally I think yes)?  Can the pre-launch
development “take over” a game, making responsiveness to players
subordinate to the game timeline set out in development?

Clay



> Here's something I'm really curious about. I know the development/pre-
> production cycle for existing ARGs has varied wildly from Heist's six
> weeks (was it?) to Perplex City at over a year. How long have you
> guys planned before launching, and what do you think is an ideal
> length for your preproduction phase?
>
> It would be especially interesting to hear from grassroots teams who
> are presumably working with a different set of time constraints.
>
> --
> Andrea Phillips
> http://www.perplexcity.com
> http://www.deusexmachinatio.com

-- 
"In complete stillness, a stone girl is dancing"