Agile versus Sturdy Methodology in Game Development

During the initial stage of game development, the team decides which development methodology to adopt. In this blog post I will be discussing trade-offs between agile and sturdy methodologies.

First off, the obvious advantage of the agile method is the ability to produce working products fast and being highly adaptable to unforeseen changes and obstacles during development. While those are extremely valuable attributes, sometimes diving in head first without an adequate amount of planning can be detrimental to a project. Sturdy methodologies are more strict and usually flow from design to implementation stage subsequently without being able to go back to the previous stage. This type of development style has a clear start and a clear ending, which is easy to learn and follow through with.

Which is the better approach for game design? I believe that while they both have their own advantages, the agile development style falls more within the scope of game development. The reason being that the landscape of the gaming world has continuously changing demands as well due to new technology and innovation. By going with the agile development style, you can come up with a working model of your game really fast and be able to obtain feedback before committing too many resources. With the sturdy method, typically we would be spending many many many weeks of resources planning the game and creating an incredibly elaborate design spec without knowing if the actual game will succeed (Of course everyone thinks theirs will!). By the time we enter the latter half of the development cycle, the game gets tested and thats whenwe will know if the game we intended to make ended up to be all that we want it to be. If there was a core flaw in the game (a game concept error rather than a technical error in programming), it would be already too late to go back and fix it! When we are being agile, we can consistently obtain feedback on each build of the game and modify it accordingly. Not only does it sound useful for the actual game developers, it provides external stakeholders more reassurance in the game that is being developed! Agile development allows you to always have a working model of your game that can concretely show what you have been working on.

While both agile and sturdy methods are both widely used development models in the world of software engineering, due to the unique characteristics involved in game design, I believe that following a more agile approach will provide many more advantages during its product development life cycle.