Gamasutra has a nice excerpt by one of the team at Media Molecule: a post-mortem of their system used to build Little Big Planet.
This one is interesting not only because LBP is a triple-A, multi-region launch, console-shifting game - but that it was built by 31 people in Guildford, England. Most of them under 30, too, I wager. This bit jumped out at me:
Once we had gotten to the stage (post greenlight) where the concept
crystallized, Healey consolidated all the various ideas into a design
document to share with the team. This document wasn't kept up to date
daily, but a full consolidation was done at key points to make sure
everyone was behind it.
Two classics in there: concepts crystallising post-greenlight - explains how the game you start out to make is often not the one you end up with - and updating documents post-facto.
We have this at work, where indies are often asked to stuff descriptions into documents - specification documents no less - even after the work is delivered. It's hilarious, and broken, and has to change.
Concepts crystallising post-greenlight and all the other inevitable change in projects are why specifications are often better understood - and more useful - as output rather than input documents.
Posted by: rodcorp | February 02, 2009 at 17:06