The Well-Executed Process Fallacy

Once upon a time, life as a game developer was pure and simple. I had an idea. I held it in my head. Perhaps I kept a list of tasks in a text document or a pad of paper, and spent most of my time working on the game, played it regularly, and either finished it or abandoned it. I picked a project because it seemed like a good opportunity to learn, or because I wanted to see particular idea come to life. I measured my success by whether it was fun for me and others, giving little thought to deadlines, efficiency, etc.

Once I cofounded a real indie studio, we adapted tools and process to make communication easier, to help us hit deadlines, and to help make life more predictable as our teams grow and our projects become more complex.

Most game projects use some hybrid of “waterfall” and “agile” process. As our organizations mature, we tend to work in sprints and milestones, have daily check-ins (or “scrums”), break our work down into epics, projects, and tasks. We develop our ways of working, and in an ideal world, we continually improve our process, gain efficiency, lower stress, and get to better products faster.

These processes and tools are great, and very necessary for complex team projects. But there is a subtle but sinister shift that tends to happen as we focus more and more of our energy towards keeping our projects moving.

We set sprint goals, and meet them. We measure our team velocity, and improve it. We set deadlines, and hit them. We gauge playtest sentiment, and improve it. And over time if all of these things are improving, we feel like we’re succeeding. It’s incredibly alluring to measure our success by a set of metrics that we improve. And don’t get me wrong, improving our process is essential.

But this focus can seriously obscure a deeper question that we should be asking ourselves regularly:

Am I actually making the right game?

I believe this is a question that indie developers should ask ourselves more often. And not just at the beginning of a project - but at virtually every stage. It’s incredibly easy to start working on a thing without giving it much thought, and then to get lost in a trap of a well-executed process for months or years, often creating a shipped game that has no chance at accomplishing our original goals.

I have a lot more to write on this topic (I’ve been working on a whole book about it.) But for now, I’d like to challenge us all to take a step back from our sprint boards and roadmaps, and zoom out a bit further to ask: Is the train moving in the right direction?

Character Art by Jin Li