Talking About Agile at the London Games Festival Skills Week

I gave a talk at the London Games Festival Skills Week last week. I was a bit worried because I didn't really have any knowledge of the games industry. Maybe, I thought, the kind of things that I was saying, the kind of examples that I used wouldn't be relevant. I needn't have been worried. It seems that the same kind of changes affect the development of games as affect other kinds of software development. Changes in specification, changes in technology and changes in "climate" whether that's economic, business or political all make things more complicated than they first seem and stop things going according to initial plans.

I was interested to hear from Marc Brandon D'Souza that game development is getting more iterative and less dependent on an enormous initial design document.

I was also interested to hear people from Monumental Gamestalk about the way that Massively Multi-player Online (MMO's) games are developed. It seems almost perfect match with Agile development. MMO's don't deliver all their functionality at once, they rely on periodic upgrades to keep the people who play entertained. They also rely on a community of players to give them feedback on which features are popular, which features are unpopular and which features are lacking.