Agile Game Development with Scrum

Deliver Better Games Faster, On BudgetAnd Make Game Development Fun Again!   Game development is in crisisfacing bloated budgets, impossible schedules, unmanageable complexity, and death march overtime. Its no wonder so many development studios are struggling to survive. Fortunately, there is a solution. Scrum and Agile methods are already revolutionizing development outside the game industry. Now, long-time game developer Clinton Keith shows exactly how to successfully apply these methods to the unique challenges of game development.  Keith has spent more than fifteen years developing games, seven of them with Scrum and agile methods. Drawing on this unparalleled expertise, he shows how teams can use Scrum to deliver games more efficiently, rapidly, and cost-effectively; craft games that offer more entertainment value; and make life more fulfilling for development teams at the same time. Youll learn to form successful agile teams that incorporate programmers, producers, artists, testers, and designersand promote effective collaboration within and beyond those teams, throughout the entire process. From long-range planning to progress tracking and continuous integration, Keith offers dozens of tips, tricks, and solutionsall based firmly in reality and hard-won experience. Coverage includes Understanding Scrums goals, roles, and practices in the context of game development Communicating and planning your games vision, features, and progress Using iterative techniques to put your game into a playable state every two to four weeks even daily Helping all team participants succeed in their roles Restoring stability and predictability to the development process Managing ambiguous requirements in a fluid marketplace Scaling Scrum to large, geographically distributed development teams Getting started: overcoming inertia and integrating Scrum into your studios current processes Increasingly, game developers and managers are recognizing that things cant go on the way they have in the past. Game development organizations need a far better way to work. Agile Game Development with Scrum gives them thatand brings the profitability, creativity, and fun back to game development.