Why Agile?

Vertical Slice - Part Two

Agile Development

Course Introduction and Planning

Game Jams and Skilling Up

Set your goals and find your community

What is the Design Process? 

Scope

Constraints and Our Theme

Concentric Design

Why Prototype? 

Assets shouldn't be liabilities

The Stages of Game Development

Planning your project

CRC Cards

Your First Milestone: Vertical Slice

Refactoring

Sprint Planning

Alpha Build

What is Playtesting?

How To Playtest

Sprint Plan

Review and Redesign

How to Release your Game

Alpha and Beyond

Bonus Content

In this project you will learn about what's ahead for you on your journey to finishing a game! You'll also get a chance to confirm that you have the right knowledge and skills to get the most out of the course, along with links to useful resources that will help you on your way. You will also learn how to equip yourself for your journey, and meet some of your fellow adventurers.

Goal Setting and Community Building

In this project you will learn about using a design process to take your idea from a broad concept into a finished, polished game, the concept of scope will help you achieve your goal of making a game, how constraints can help you create rules to keep you in scope,  and how to use the specific design process, concentric design.

The Design Process

In this project you will find out if your game idea is fun through Prototyping. You will also learn how to make a plan for assets you will use in your game – the sounds, images, models, animations and other resources that make up a game – to avoid nasty surprises later in development. 

Prototyping

In this project you will learn how to keep a sense of the big picture by dividing the game development process into stages and milestones, hit your first major milestone in the development of a game through creating a vertical slice, and learn two planning tools you can use to plot a course to a finished game. 

Milestones

Professional teams schedule some time for code cleanup after each milestone so their code stays flexible and easy to work with. This project will give you some tips and general principles for this process, known as refactoring. With your vertical slice done and your code in good shape, this is where you’ll start down the road to alpha.

Writing Better Code

Playtesting is more than just asking people if your game is fun. It's a structured process for collecting useful information about specific parts of your design. In this project you will learn why Playtesting helps you collect useful information on your design and how to execute the entire process. 

Playtesting

In this project you will learn how to release your game, what the next steps are after game release, and additional tips for getting to the end. 

Release your game

Lots of people start games, but it’s surprisingly hard to finish one. This course guides you through the process used by professional game makers to develop their ideas, keep their projects on track and deliver a complete, released game. 

Explore the Unity Asset Store for game toolkits and template assets that will help you quickly design and prototype your games. These resources can accelerate your development process and help you achieve your goal of releasing a polished game!

Design and Publish Your Original Game: Unity USC Games Unlocked

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Agile for Small Teams or Solo Devs

Real-life Examples from Solo Developers

Sprint Plan for your Vertical Slice - Part 2

I had done the core game features during the first week and planned for the upcoming week, to complete the second vertical slice

FlashRun In multiverse

unity_10jonathanmarte

Explosive Spheres - Agile Tasks

Sergio R.

Plan de sprint de mi primer juego El Equilibrista

Plan de sprint

Agustin Dominguez

Changed level of priority in the backlogs

Revised backlog

unity_ABBB8FB9151B27AEEBC3

here i done indi game simular on fnaf yea i know i'm stupid 

Movie_001.mp4

maybe i am the best in alone but you the best in all 

safasfafsagj

Sprint Plan for this week

Arcane_Creator

 Working on the fox, attaching navigation, animations and scripts to it. 

Sprint Plan for Vertical Slice

kot88murmansk

This is my sprint plan for my game MadDriver. The number next to the task's name is the priority i set for each task

MadDriver's sprint plan

nezukomkii

Agile Development.mp4

Agile for Small Teams or Solo Devs.mp4

Here you'll learn the fundamentals of Agile, the process used by the vast majority of game makers to help contain the chaos of software development and still deliver exciting, well-made games. We'll give you special resources for making it work for you as a solo developer or small team.

By the end you’ll also turn in your first major milestone: the vertical slice

Unity + USC Games Unlocked

Games

VR Curricular Framework Resources

AR Curricular Framework Resources 

Game Design Curricular Framework Resources  

Architecture, Engineering and Construction Curricular Framework Resources

Use these resources to dive further into Agile, learn about the Agile Manifesto and review how solo developers utilize it's methods to make progress in their work:

Escaping the Indie Shame Spiral. A producer at Electronic Arts goes indie and ... fails. Agile to the rescue! “The critical first step to escaping the shame spiral was to start running a personal scrum as though I was leading a team back at EA.” 

Scrum Of One: How to Bring Scrum into your One-Person Operation. A solo app developer shares an in-depth look at how he uses Scrum/Agile methods to make steady progress on his work. “Scrum seemed to touch on three of the biggest pain points in my process: More productivity, more profit, more happiness.” 

For reference, here’s the original (very short) Agile manifesto.  

In this assignment you’ll make your sprint plan for the next version of your vertical slice. As a reminder a sprint plan is a prioritized list of tasks to work on in the next week.

You’ve actually already made a sprint plan – you did it last week when you pulled things out of your project backlog to work on, according to priority.

The full process (i.e. the one used by professionals) has a few more steps, but the goal is still the same: step back and decide how you can best move your game forward this week.

The instructions will be the same for each week for the rest of the project. When you’re finished you’ll turn in some form of your sprint plan as screenshots or a recorded video.

These instructions describe the exact process that professional teams of all sizes use to manage the work of game development. It has several steps, and it looks long because each step is explained, but it should only take 5-10 minutes to do for a small project. 

You’ll use the same system you used when you made your backlog, whether that’s a spreadsheet, a to-do manager like Trello, or a dedicated system like JIRA. 

Taking a couple of minutes to learn from your experience each week will make you a better developer. 

Get better at estimating. Look at your current sprint plan – that’s the to-do list you made last week. Observe what you did and didn’t get done. Look at the estimates of effort you made for each item. Were you able to make an accurate guess about how long the task took? If not, what was it that made the work take longer? Just stopping to think about it will make you better at estimating your work in the future. 

Recognize your hard work. You might be disappointed in your progress this week – that’s actually pretty normal. But take a moment and pat yourself on the back for what you did get done. You’ve climbed a little further toward being a game maker, and everything you did this week will be easier from now on. 

Reset. Take everything you didn’t finish and put it back in your backlog. That might mean copying and pasting in a spreadsheet or physically moving Post-It notes, depending on your system. 

Leave the room. It’s a good idea to physically stand up and leave the room, but failing that, at least close your eyes. Imagine your game in its final form. Think about where your game is currently, that is, what’s already visible in the build. Then open your eyes and return to your work station. 

Update your backlog. Look at the stories in your backlog. Based on your vision of the final game, do you notice anything missing? Is anything unnecessary or not as important as you thought? Are there any stories that could be combined or split into smaller parts? 

Once you’ve updated the list of stories, look at each story in turn. Ignore its current priority and whether you’ve already done work on it. How important is it, right now, to finishing your game? Update its priority accordingly. 

Look at your availability. No week is the same. Do you have doctor appointments, lunch dates, algebra tests, or meetings with your agent? Think about each day in turn and write down how many hours you will have to give to your game this week. If the answer is zero, write zero. If you plan to work all seven days, consider taking a day off in the middle so you don’t burn out. 

Choose your tasks. Now that you’ve identified the most important remaining work and the time you have to spend on it, choose stories from your backlog that you will work on this week. As you copy them into this week’s plan, go ahead and give some thought to how you will implement them. Does your estimate of effort (1, 2, 4 or 8 hours) seem about right? When you’re done, make sure your total workload matches up with your actual availability this week. 

Once your current sprint plan is complete upload it as screen shots or video capture explaining how you decided what to prioritize. 

Why Agile?

1. Agile Development

2. Agile for Small Teams or Solo Devs

3. Real-life Examples from Solo Developers

4. Sprint Plan for your Vertical Slice - Part 2

Your submission preview

Complete this Exercise