Evaluating your Game Project

It is very crucial to be clear with your project vision, before investing in your time, money and other resources.

Before you start with the game development, you should keep asking yourself some specific set of questions to evaluate the plan and the course of action for game development. Evaluating your future endeavours before hand, serves as your Project's Survival test. Steve McConnell, in his paper known as the, Software Project Survival Guide, mentioned the advantages of self evaluating the project and how to act accordingly.

The main usecase for this test is to quickly get a rough idea of your overall preparedness and hence plan your future steps, along with your team, for the game project. It is suggested to take the test at the beginning or middle of your projects and react or alter accordingly.

The Questions for Self (Project Based) Evaluation

As you know that game development follows the same development phases as that of software project development. So, for every phase, you can decide a specific set of questions, based on which we can evaluate our project development work. The questions below are divided based on the various phases:

For Game Requirements Phase

1. Whether there is a clear, definite vision statement for your game?
2. Do your team members believe in your proposed vision and find it realistic?
3. Does the project hold any realistic expectation of being profitable both for the publisher or company and for the developer(s)?
4. Were the interior gameplay and UI (User Interface) of the game been shown with description so that everyone can undoubtedly understand the main objective of the game?
5. Do your team members think that the game project will be fun and exciting?

For Planning Phase

1. Does your game have detailed, written design and development documents?
2. Does your game have to provide clear, written technical documentation, of the technical things that needs to be used in the project?
3. Does your game have detailed, written art production preparation?
4. Do you have any comprehensive, integrated project in agenda which lists all of the tasks which need to be executed?

Project Development Phase

1. Does your game have single managerial person: a project leader or lead designer to handle the overall project?
2. Have the milestones of your project been laid out having clear, measurable deliverables?
3. Do all team members as well as project leader have the right workload? Does they have adequate amount of time to deal with large projects?
4. Do your developers have any access to an anonymous communication platform or channel where they can give feedback or report regarding their problems during the game development problems without hesitation or fear?
5. Does your project have an undoubtedly defined method for defining how changes can be reviewed by your team leads?
6. Is all the source code under version control software like Perforce, Git etc?