Description
Book SynopsisMaster Lean UX and Lean Startup techniques to improve your agile game development experience beyond Scrum. This updated version of the book focuses on applying lean and agile methodologies to the game development process and features improved examples, applied techniques, and a whole new section explaining how to test a game in Unity with CI.You'll see how to define a minimum viable product (MVP) for games with Lean Canvas, allowing customers to iterate over it and collect feedback for improvement at every cycle. All of these are achieved while still using standard Agile techniques. The first part of the book explains the ideation process of a game and how lean methodologies allow developers, especially small studios, to avoid scope creep. Next, it it provides guidance on creating MVPs and using player feedback to iterate and improve games. The book then discusses continual improvement (CI) methods. A crucial part of CI is generation of Lean Canvas.LeanGame Development, Second Edition
Table of ContentsChapter 1: Introduction
Sub –Topics
• Why lean game development, not agile game development?
• How do lean and agile relate to the game world?
• Games and software relate much more deeply.
• What kind of game is software development?
• Where did it go wrong?
• Summary
Chapter 2: First steps with Lean
Sub – Topics
• Seven key principles of lean
• Lean inception
• Lean PMO
• Lean DevOps
• Kanban
• How can you take advantage of Scrum
• Continuous integration
• Going from build-measure-learn to lean game
• Looking deeper at the inception
• Test driven development
• Lean and Games
• Summary
Chapter 3: An Inception in practice
Sub - Topics:
• How and why, we did an Inception
• How was our inception?
• Prioritizing ideas
• Persona development
• Next Steps with lean
• How does the game look like from the inception perspective
• Summary
Chapter 4: Do we really need a MVP
Sub - Topics:
• MVP and MVG Defined
• Building Prototypes
• The Product Owner role in MVP/prototype
• Getting more from less
• Recognizing when a game is not viable
• Thinking simpler first
• From MVP Canvas to Lean Game Development
• MVGs and prototypes of Super Jujuba Sisters
• Summary
Chapter 5: Examples of MVGs
Sub - Topics:
• Guerrilla Games: From Killzone FPS to open world Horizon Zero Dawn
- Conception
- Thunderjaw (core mechanic example)
- Open World
- Vegetation System
- Proof of Concept
- Pre-production
- Production
• Archero: Casual Games as a Great Lean Process
• Dead cells: Quick feedback loop
- Dead cells Core Concept
- Expanding to multiplayer
- Pivoting Tower Defense
- MVP
Chapter 6: Generating Hypothesis
Sub - Topics:
• When hypothesis are not created from the Inception
Chapter 7: Test Driven Deveopment
Sub - Topics:
• TDD defined
• Tests are good, but then why there is so much poorly tested code?
• Applying TDD to games
• Next steps to improve TDD
Chapter 8: Continuous Integration
Sub - Topics:
• Why continuous integration
• Using continuous integration
• Code versioning
• Automated build
• Summary
Chapter 9: The world between Design and Build
Sub - Topics:
• A little bit about Design
• A little bit about Build
• Pretty Beautiful, but how is it done?
• Summary
Chapter 10: Test, Code, Test
Sub - Topics:
• Testing types
• Test cases
• Coding game art work
• Coding the game software
• Test automation
• Summary
Chapter 11: Measuring and Analyzing
Sub - Topics:
• Ways of measuring
• Feedback
• More on feedback
• Other ways of measuring
• Measuring through hypothesis
• Analyzing
• Summary
Chapter 12: Creating ideas for iterating
Sub - Topics:
• Action Items
• The features are OK, but the game is not fun
• The Game is fun but very difficult to play
• Rethink the limitations on Game Development
• Tying things together
• Summary
Chapter 13: Consolidating Knowledge before Expanding
Sub - Topics
• Automated testing
• Agile methodologies
• Art and Iteration process
• Avoiding Time Waste
• Continuous Delivery
• Summary
Chapter 14: More about games
Chapter 15: Example game using Automated testing for game development
Sub - Topics
• Setting up Unity for testing.
• Creating testing scenes and objects
• Setting up a CI for Unity
• Testing Gameplay, how to test character controllers
• More testing scenarios for games
• How to test ECS with Bevy Engine
• Summary
