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[nikwing]

Hi guys,

A quick question: How do you manage your game and decide date for milestones and deadlines for your personal indie game project??

I've read some made feature list target/week, etc2.
But how to avoid to stretch the dev time to "its done when its done" and also avoid a really tight deadline where all team member must crunch everynight....

is there a sweet spot formula?

Thank you

[Chris Koźmik]

All projects where I have set a deadline resulted in 3 times faster development on average. Not to mention increased quality (deadline makes you kill lame features really early).

No brainer for me, deadline is a life saver.

and also avoid a really tight deadline where all team member must crunch everynight....

The deadline should state how many hours each day you can use max, so you can simply say that above 8 hours a day is NOT ALLOWED

The whole point and trick of deadlines is not that it makes you work harder but that it makes you kill useless things. If deadline is not FUN you are doing something terribly wrong (because it is utterly fun to me each time).

[cliffski]

I've found that you need to ship a game just about the point where you are either beginning to be sick of the sight of it, or you begin to panic that you won't get your investment back in terms of sales.
Basically you need to ship while you are still positive and motivated, because then comes all the hard work of promoting the game.

[chubigans]

Its weird, but I always set up a schedule/deadline for the days when I'm coding. I make them easy to achieve and add a few more that I'm not sure I'll get to.

When I don't set up deadlines for myself I feel a little more lost for some reason, hah.

[Eponasoft]

Deadlines are meant to be broken. I have a production that's one year past deadline right now, and it won't be done anytime soon.

[Monstr1337]

The best way to manage a game project is to the SCRUM process and use burn down charts. It's the most efficient way to keep a game on track and most triple AAA studios use a watered down of SCRUM to accommodate there process. It's a nice way to set milestones for alpha, beta, and release. It also depends on the games project and scope. If it's a Flash project thats going to take say three months for example then alpha is due at the end of the first month, beta, second, and the last month is extreme polish and then release. If the game is going to take a year or more then alpha is due within the first 4-5 months while beta gets hammered out. 

Also keep in mind there's a thing called "man-hours" that should be factored into managing your project. X amount of man-hours for each asset, feature.

Milestones and deadlines though never meet the exact date and you should rather focus on making a polished product than trying to reach a milestone because you have to. Just put "pressure" on yourself or you'll fall into "i'll get it done, when I want to" mentality.

[ANtY]

Deadlines are meant to be broken. I have a production that's one year past deadline right now, and it won't be done anytime soon.

Same here

And I'm already sick of it 

[TeeGee]

Deadlines are meant to NOT be broken. If you get into habit of missing them, they lose any value and it's becoming harder and harder to keep the team motivated.

Some tips that worked for me (missed only a single deadline during the last project):
- Typical mistake is to set impossible or overly hard deadlines. When you know you are going to fail, you don't even try.
- Have the first few milestones relatively short and easy. Use them to gauge how fast you can do stuff in reality. Then plan further ones according to that data.
- Make sure that the deadline was discussed with each team member and they said they can do their part. Even better - make them set their own milestones.
- Try using shorter milestones if you have problems. It's easier to plan ahead for a week than for a month.
- Have a clear goal for each deadline. Something rewarding. Like a new demo, or another level fully playable.
- The above also helps in determining which tasks are crucial and which can be dropped in the worst case scenario.
- Don't forget to include weekends and holidays in your plans.
- When you set a deadline, take the amount of time you think you can get it done and multiply it by two. It's to accommodate for unexpected issues, additional tasks that pop up, bugs, etc.
- General management tip: don't be an asshole about deadlines. Show people some trust. If your artist doesn't do anything for several days and then crunches overnight to get everything done, that's not your business as long as he's on time in the end. Most people hate to be nagged. If someone constantly misses their deadlines, just fire them.
- If you lead the team, try to never miss a deadline. Nothing demotivates more than a leader who seems to be slacking.
- Have a clear list of tasks that's available to everyone. Tick off things that are done daily. It's motivating and satisfying in that gamey way to see how things are progressing.

Hope it helps .

[Eponasoft]

Deadlines are meant to NOT be broken.

I think you missed the emote, indicating sarcasm.

[TeeGee]

Nah, but I thought it could be good to make that point, as many developers (consciously or not) really think so.

[James Coote]

I think if you feel the need to set deadlines, you're probably the sort of person who needs deadlines to get things done.

Deadlines are like budgets. They are estimates ultimately designed to help you plan. It isn't the end of the world if you go over them, however, the more you set, the better you should be at setting well balanced and thought out ones, and so the more worried you should be when you're going over them (Either you're failing to learn to plan/budget, or you're genuinely slacking)

[VortexCortex]

"I love deadlines. I love the whooshing noise they make as they go by."
- Douglas Adams

They're big shoes to fill, but I'll be damned if I won't try!

[Eponasoft]

I rarely set deadlines... more interested in milestones.

[ANtY]

I rarely set deadlines... more interested in milestones.

this

[nikwing]

Thank you for all the replies, its interesting to hear so many different views.
Right now we just planning to do simple mobile games that roughly will take 3-4 months to develop.

I'll pass this info to my team members, who some is traumatized after working in a big company and they hv bad management & deadline that cause months of midnight OT. 

[ஒழுக்கின்மை (Paul Eres)]

Deadlines are meant to NOT be broken. If you get into habit of missing them, they lose any value and it's becoming harder and harder to keep the team motivated.

Some tips that worked for me (missed only a single deadline during the last project):
- Typical mistake is to set impossible or overly hard deadlines. When you know you are going to fail, you don't even try.
- Have the first few milestones relatively short and easy. Use them to gauge how fast you can do stuff in reality. Then plan further ones according to that data.
- Make sure that the deadline was discussed with each team member and they said they can do their part. Even better - make them set their own milestones.
- Try using shorter milestones if you have problems. It's easier to plan ahead for a week than for a month.
- Have a clear goal for each deadline. Something rewarding. Like a new demo, or another level fully playable.
- The above also helps in determining which tasks are crucial and which can be dropped in the worst case scenario.
- Don't forget to include weekends and holidays in your plans.
- When you set a deadline, take the amount of time you think you can get it done and multiply it by two. It's to accommodate for unexpected issues, additional tasks that pop up, bugs, etc.
- General management tip: don't be an asshole about deadlines. Show people some trust. If your artist doesn't do anything for several days and then crunches overnight to get everything done, that's not your business as long as he's on time in the end. Most people hate to be nagged. If someone constantly misses their deadlines, just fire them.
- If you lead the team, try to never miss a deadline. Nothing demotivates more than a leader who seems to be slacking.
- Have a clear list of tasks that's available to everyone. Tick off things that are done daily. It's motivating and satisfying in that gamey way to see how things are progressing.

Hope it helps .

didn't you say that that game took a year longer than you expected? i'm not it counts as missing only "a single deadline" if you missed it by one year :p

((and yes i'm not one to talk))

that said, i agree with you for the most part. a couple of additions though:

i think deadlines keep you on track even when they aren't met -- for instance, when i did immortal defense, the original deadline was to do it in 6 weeks (crazy, i know). it wound up taking 7 months, but if i hadn't set the deadline of 6 weeks i never would have done it even in 7 months. so in that sense "made to be broken" makes sense in that even if you break it, it still benefits someone more to have set a deadline and broke it than to never have set one at all

also i think that short-term deadlines are more effective than long-term ones -- doing X, Y, and Z by the end of a month is a lot more achievable than doing A through Z by the end of a year

so short-term deadlines like that at least keep the game moving, i can't imagine making games without any sort of deadline at all, just working on whatever part of the game seems fun at the time. there are developers who work like that, but i can't really work that way myself, it seems incredibly dangerous to work that way (and often when a game is abandoned or never finished usually they were worked on in that way)

[ANtY]

i can't imagine making games without any sort of deadline at all, just working on whatever part of the game seems fun at the time.

How does this connect? I don't set any deadlines yet I have specified milestones, not "let's work on whatever seems fun"

[TeeGee]

didn't you say that that game took a year longer than you expected? i'm not it counts as missing only "a single deadline" if you missed it by one year :p

Haha, yeah. However, I was talking about our internal deadlines, the parts of the game that were actually scheduled, and not how the release itself slipped. Trying to find a reliable writer is not really something you can fix with deadlines and milestones -- it's a broader issue. The game's code, art and design were done in about 4 months, with one milestone slipping by about 2 weeks.

[ஒழுக்கின்மை (Paul Eres)]

i can't imagine making games without any sort of deadline at all, just working on whatever part of the game seems fun at the time.

How does this connect? I don't set any deadlines yet I have specified milestones, not "let's work on whatever seems fun"

i was considering milestones and deadlines to be almost synonyms (variations on the same thing), one just doesn't have a specified time and the other dies. a main thing about deadlines is not just its date, but also its line

but yeah some people have a to-do list but no schedule. i'm not sure that works either, but it probably depends on the individual. for some people having a schedule and feeling that they'd miss it causes such a large degree of stress that they are unable to work at all; for those people it's best to avoid deadlines, at least until they build up the psychological self-confidence to enable them to set deadlines without getting stressed about them

but i do know a lot of people who work like that: they have clear goals, they know exactly what they want to do, but then they don't set dates / timelines / schedules to reach those targets. so usually they don't meet them. i think one's control over *when* one acts is just as important as one's control over *what* one does, if not more important

[ஒழுக்கின்மை (Paul Eres)]

Haha, yeah. However, I was talking about our internal deadlines, the parts of the game that were actually scheduled, and not how the release itself slipped. Trying to find a reliable writer is not really something you can fix with deadlines and milestones -- it's a broader issue. The game's code, art and design were done in about 4 months, with one milestone slipping by about 2 weeks.

ah, i see. so most of the delay of the game was due to the writing not being finished, with most of the other stuff finished? that makes sense, yeah. does that mean you worked on something else while you were waiting for the writing to be finished, or did you just keep on improving the game's code/art during that time?