How to do production plan well?

How to do well design for 1 man resource's

1 week, 2 week, 1 month , 2 month, 3 month

game production plan? at each case.

And I experienced that even if I do 1 month plan, actual took time was normally x2 or x3 of that time, so actually it took 3 months to finish to production.

 

Everyone seems to underestimate required time to begin with. Heck, some people never stop. It's pretty difficult.

With regards to planning... for long term stuff I suggest having broad goals with timeframes, such as "5 completed levels by June". I don't do much in the way of detailed planning more than a couple of weeks in advance, because I don't find it to be useful - things will change, especially if your game is being built with heavy player feedback in the loop. So, have regular, short planning sessions where you look at the most up-to-date info at hand and figure out just the next few steps towards hitting your upcoming goals.

 

What you basically do is have a broader todo list, then have a more specific todo list.

Then you basically change these todo lists every week or day or whatever. You have a target that as you move towards it will move itself, the key to keep going is to keep refreshing your inspiration along the way towards that evolving goal.

 

But so overall, final product should be have working commercial valuable goods, if not, it will not sell and I will be failed again even after 1~3 months effort put it in. So its very difficult to know everything I need to do plan well to make game that has actual sold value.

 

As a rule of thumb, visually make it shiney and finished as that's what will compete in a marketplace, but it's a game so it's all about fun. If it's fun and you go out and show that to people, I think people will like it. If they aren't liking it, it may need revisions.

 

Sounds like you've done it enough times to know how long it takes you to do tasks. Write down goals, make shorter time goals instead of the entirety of the project.

 

First, know precisely where you are going.

Then, have a secondary plan of where to satisfactorily stop if you cannot make it to the end goal. This means defining what can be cut out ahead of time. The more decisions your make clear up front, the

If you do not know precisely where the end is, you may go right past it, and never reach it. Have a "backstop." A backstop is a landmark that, if seen, informs you that you have gone too far.

The most important part of your work is "blocking out." This is getting the biggest pieces that define your work set into the correct places. When the block out is finished, the thing will be ugly, but anybody will easily recognize it.

The block out will take about 1/3 of your time, but if it isn't perfect, the rest of your time will be for nothing. You cannot fail the block out. Playtesting helps confirm that you did the block out correctly.

The remaining 2/3rd's are less important, but more time consuming. This is the detail work. Further playtesting, bug fixing, refining, refining, refining. If your blockout was good, everybody already knows what your thing is. The goal of the detail work is to make the thing shine.

Once it's shiny, it's good to have time to sit on it. Observing the thing later in the future, you may notice blemishes you missed before.

 

The key to shipping on time is nailing your design and requirements. If those things don't change (feature creep) then you'll be much more accurate with your time estimates.

Note that polish can also be a form of feature creep. It's better to not polish and instead dedicate an entire 'sprint' to polish. But like anything plan and design what needs polishing first!

 

Correct planning is a long term process, it's not just planning ahead, but also looking back at what you did by tracking how long you did something, what were the obstacle and hindrance, and finding new way to work around those issues for future works.

If you are new to it, I would decompose tasks into sizeable chunk, I would do rough estimation using a fermi type estimation, track time and events that happen during a chunk, then at the end of it do a post mortem to evaluate what did go well, what did go wrong and what could be better.

Generally if you are inexperienced you will see that what you think is the core of the task is not were time is exhausted. For example rot tasks might be susceptible to warm up time, so interuption is what consume time, you might underestimate some aspect of a task and over estimate others, psychological logistic also become apparent and managing motivation, stress, interruption, habit, etc ... can become the focus, which mean planning can be dependant of the environement.

Generally planning is the antithesis of creativity, creativity increase uncertainty, and uncertainty is the great destroyer of planning. If you look around at big g project, even the successful one, you will see a lot of pain into compromise made to meet deadline. You don't want to be creative during production unless it's aboiut meeting deadline better. Remember people won't judge your work based on your grand vision but base on the end result and how it hooks them. So only start production once you have answered all the creative question before hand. Working in a team help a lot as you have to take commitement and not change things on the fly based on fancy new idea ofd the week you have.

 

I wonder if there are developer logs and journals out there you could read on this subject.

 

I have written some articles as an introduction to video game production. It should be a good starting point to have an overview of the different types of assets and processes required to organise information correctly and drive a game project efficiently.

There are available in the blog section of my website : http://raphaelgervaise.com/