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In today's main Gamasutra feature, excerpting a chapter of the recently published book Object-Oriented Game Development, Microsoft Research Cambridge developer Jul...

Simon Carless, Blogger

July 20, 2005

1 Min Read

In today's main Gamasutra feature, excerpting a chapter of the recently published book Object-Oriented Game Development, Microsoft Research Cambridge developer Julian Gold covers iterative development techniques as he seeks to explain what order programming tasks should be done, and when a game should be considered finished. In the introduction to the section on prioritizing game tasks, Gold explains: "The worst thing in the world as far as development is concerned is to be writing system-critical code towards the end of a project. Yet this is such a common occurrence you would think someone would have spotted it and put a stop to it. Not only will (and does) it induce huge amounts of stress in the team, it is absolutely guaranteed to introduce all sorts of problems in other systems that were considered stable. Ideally, we would like to pick an order to perform tasks in that does not lead to this horror. Ideally, we would like to be able to know in advance which are the tasks and systems that we need to work on first and which are those that can wait a while. If we cannot attain this ‘ideal' state – and I would be foolhardy to suggest we can – we can certainly do better than writing critical-path code during Alpha or Beta phases in a project!" You can now read the full Gamasutra-published extract from Gold's book (no registration required, please feel free to link to the article from external websites).

About the Author(s)

Simon Carless

Blogger

Simon Carless is the founder of the GameDiscoverCo agency and creator of the popular GameDiscoverCo game discoverability newsletter. He consults with a number of PC/console publishers and developers, and was previously most known for his role helping to shape the Independent Games Festival and Game Developers Conference for many years.

He is also an investor and advisor to UK indie game publisher No More Robots (Descenders, Hypnospace Outlaw), a previous publisher and editor-in-chief at both Gamasutra and Game Developer magazine, and sits on the board of the Video Game History Foundation.

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