Handling delays

No matter how I look at the calendar and this milestone’s schedule, there’s no two way about this–we have a delay.

 

So far we’re late only by about two weeks–which is not much by game develeopment standards–but delays have a nasty tendency to add up, and even two weeks can mean death of the project, if you are living on your last savings.

 

So how to handle this? In a company I worked before, we used to have dramatic meetings, where blame was assigned, team complained about everything and everyone, and we received a speech about “last chance to save the project”.

 

When we finished, this:

 

 

Started to feel like this:

 

 

I wanted to avoid that. The reason why we’re working together is not because we signed a contract, but because we’re a bunch of friends. It’s a very valuable dynamic, it makes us trust and feel responsible for each other, and risking losing it seems unwise. Even if it means a short-term productivity boost.

 

I think it’s important to understand why delays happen, and more importantly, that they will happen. Games are not made by robots with precisely defined tasks. Some features will always take more time than planned, some art will always end up being re-done, and last minute bugs are bound to happen.  It’s a hard work, that reaquires crativity and fresh mind, and if you team is overworked, their productivity will fall down.

 

Pushing the blame around won’t make the delay and the dangers it brings go away. Action is necessary. Here, I must admit I learned a lot from my former peers. After each of those dramatic meetings, we would have a brainstorm on how to get things right on track. It went like this:

 

• We identified the most overburdened team members, and checked if their tasks could be moved to someone with more time or outsourced entirely.
• We looked at parts of the game that take the most time, and wondered if they can be simplified or their pipeline improved.
• We checked the list of the game’s features and looked for anything non-essential that could be removed to make more time for the crucial aspects to be done well.
• We’ve set a new and more realistic deadline, and checked if it still allows for a reasonably soon release, or if the project should be scrapped.

 

We did it every time a milestone slipped or even looked endangered. This way, all the issues would get addressed, before they snowballed and turned a minor slip into a six months catastrophe (though, it took us several failures like that to get it right).

 

When I saw that we’re running late with Cinders, my mind immediatelly went back to those meetings. I skipped the dramatism and immediatelly went to the “finding solutions” part. If my boss would ask me what to do now, what would I suggest? — I thought. Here’s what we did in the end:

 

• I told everyone that we have a delay. It was obvious, but stating it officially is always important. I didn’t complain how bad it is, I didn’t blame anyone, I didn’t say that if we don’t fix it, it’s the end of our indie venture. It’s all obvious, and I trust my friends to understand it. If they don’t, then–well–I’m fucked anyway.
• I checked my task list and realized I’ll become the team’s bottleneck eventually, if things are to stay as they are. I was to make all the code, writing, features, business development and promotion. It’s too much.
• Out of these, writing takes a lot of time and is best done in complete focus, that I was unlikely to attain. I realized it’s my biggest problem right now.
• We emailed a professional writer who offered her help before, and asked if she’s still interested. She joined the team, and if it works out, it will give me almost twice the time to work on features and all the meta stuff.
• Some non-essential features were moved to the “optional” list. That is: we still would like to do them if time allows, but we can ship the game without them.
• We’ve set a new deadline for the current milestone and acknowledged that the game will probably be released a month later. I adjusted my home budget to allow for that.

 

Will it work? Well, we sure hope so. I’m certainly glad we took action now and not near the release, when it would be too late to do anything significant.

 

Do you have any other tips or different experiences with handling and preventing delays?