David Cosgrove

Clinton Keith was part of Sammy Studios, developing Darkwatch (at the time meant to rival Halo). They had all the reseources any game devs could want – within a year it was 6 months behind schedule. From here Agile met game devleopment.

Scrum, Lean and Extreme Programming are methodologies of Agile game development.

“What has led us to bloated budgets, schedules that are never met, and

project overtime death marches?” Preface xxi

"An industry that sold its good in Ziploc bags now rakes in more cash than the Hollywood box office". Pg3

Home computer and console market driven by Moore's Law. "Every several years a new generation of processors rolls off the fabrication lines, the performance of which dwarfs that of the previous generation. Consumers have an insatiabke thirst for the features this power provides, while developers rush to quench those thirsts with power-hungry applications." pg5

The mid-80s saw the decline in the video game market. Falling hardware costs allowed almost anyone to create a game; which they did and which flooded the market. Consumers decided to spend money on other things.

Illustration 1: Waterfall game development

When games got more expensive to make due to techological developments allowing greater results and of course meaning more people were required to produce tese results; different methods were adopted for game development. One was a Waterfall style methodology. Each stage was more expensive than the last. The flip side here is, most of the design is performed early on – most of the testing is made late on.

"By the ninteies, small teams of severl people were required to create games, and they often took longer than several months to finish. This raised the cost of creating games proportionally, and they've continued to rise..." pg8 But the hits dont pay for as many misses as they did like 30 years ago - it's getting to the stage now where every game a publishers releases will have to be a hit just to break even

The hit-or-miss model. One hit pays for many failures.

"Most recent games go over budget and fail to stay on schedule" pg10. The decline fo the hit-or-miss model has resulted in three things for studios; Less innovation, less game value (poor game), deteriorating work environment for devs and makers.

Typically, games dont last as long now as they used to, so consumers are less willing to shell out £60 for a game. As a result, rentals and second-hand / trading has blossomed

The agile manifesto;

In development, a lot is planned but a lot changes also. For example; when testing a first person shooter, the type of guns desired / required may change depending on what feels right.

Illustration 2: Reducing uncertainty

"Production should begin when the uncertainty about the gaame mechanics and the uncertainty of the technology and tools to make the game have been reduced." pg19

Illustration 3: Uncertainty

Clint Keith warns us to be wary of entering into production too soon, without the proper knowledge of what to build. A team could spend a lot of time in production building things which are based on assumption.

"Game development is primarliy about learning what to make and how to make it". Pg21

“Agile development focuses on building knowledge about value, cost, and schedule and adjusting the plan to match reality.” pg21

"Find the fun" is the mantra of any iterative and incremental game development project. Pg23. The fun must be found at every step, or iteration. A game that isn't fun must be questioned at each stage. Try to find the fun first off. It also works from the techie side; fixing a bug minutes or days after it was created is way better than trying to delve in and sort it out months down the line.

Delivering working / playable software in interation will help to ID problems as allow you to assess ideas.

Part of Agile methodology is to have smaller teams of multi-disciplines who are in charge of more decisions, decisions on small scale; giving them more ownership and freeing up higher management.

Fixed milestone deliverables in a contract – good or bad?

The agile method means; Plan for what is known, iterate against what is not known. An agile project is composed of a series of iterations of development. Iterations are short intervals of time, usually 2 or 4 weeks, during which the game makes progress. Developers implement individual features that have value to customers / players at every iteration. These features are called user stories.

Iterations include every aspect of development, eg; concept, coding, asset creation, debugging optimising, etc. The game is reviewed at the end of every iteration and the results influence the goals of future iterations. Inspect and adapt. "The first iterations of a project will often focus on building the minimum necessary infrastructure, if one does not exist, before any valuable gameplay is seen.” pg29

Illustration 4: Agile development not constrained to original goals

PART II: SCRUM & AGILE PLANNING

How can I apply Scrum methodology to myself? It seems designed for teams of people in an organisation...Think of Keith's Industrial Revolution analogy...perhaps think of Scrum as a production line where one product is assembled at various stages. Each stage is QC'd before it progresses onto the next stage. Every 2 to 4 weeks the stages are assesed to see if they can be improved towards making both the end product AND the experience of making it, better.

Each Product Baclog Item (PBI) has a list of tasks developed which are required in order to make the particular PBI happen. Say I want to make a player able to make a character jump in-game...

This course of this task or Sprint is between2 to 4 weeks and each day, they team has a daily scrum to share progress and impediments of their work. The objective of the sprint is the sprint goal. Releases are a set of sprints desinged to bring about major new features in a game. They usually last about 2 to 4 months. Releases start with a planning session that establishes the major goals for te game.

"The value of each feature to the player is used to prioritise the backlog." pg42

The most important PBIs are at the top of the list (the Product Backlog). PBIs at the bottom of the list as they only rise to the top when I'm closer to implementing them. Breaking down each PBI from the Product Backlog must be done in order to understand the tasks required to undertake during the sprint.

Illustration 5: Sprint method for a more complex issue

One of the roles I have is that of Product Owner. I'm responsible for communicating the vision of the game and maximising return on investment. I need to understand the market and business aspects of the project. I am the scrum team and I am the developer, self-organsing and self-managing. I determine how much work I can commit to at the start of a sprint and take responsibility to deliver it. I must reduce impediments!

It's important that I conduct sprint reviews at the end of each iteration.

Tracking Progress:

Task Cards (different colour cards which prioritise work)

Burndown charts (a line graph, hours ndded to complete tasks v days left). Look these up.

Task board (below is a Task Board example; a list of PBIs which with related tasks which are moved depending on what state the PBI task is in. The second column is the tasks relating to completing each PBI).

User Stories

Stakeholder's language is business. Artist's language is that of polygons and tecure and lighting. Programmer's language is that of math and code. A universal language must be spoken, that of the consumer or player.

A User Story is a short description of a game, tool or pipeline feature that has a clear value to the user. If the feature is a tool or pipeline change, the user can be a developer who uses the tool or pipeline to make the game. Who are you? What do you want? Why do you want it?

Teams complete one or more user stories per sprint. We dont want to break down every large feature into sprint sized stories at the start of a project. That creates too many stories to be practically managed by the product owner; me. Instead, priority determines when features are broken down. User stories that are too large to be accomplished in a single sprint are called epics (like a player wanting an online gaming feature; which leads to different types of online gaming desires and the ability to decide which game to join in a lobby). Sometimes a number of related user stories are gathered together in a theme.

The following INVEST attributes are suggested for the makings of a good story;

INDEPENDENT - Stories should be independent of other stories in the order they are implimented. Dependecies create problems which make things hard to prioritise.

NEGOTIABLE – Stories are not locked in contracts. They're placeholders for conversation where things can change which will add value and allows better ideas to rise up.

VALUABLE – Stories need to communicate value to the player and the team developing the game.

ESTIMATABLE - A spike is a story introduced to add knowledge about the cost of implementing the feature - a story which at this point may be simple OR complicated to implement. The story such as this will be timeboxed so a great deal of time and effort wont be spent on it. This helps the story be estimatable.

SIZED APPROPRIATELY – Stories need to be made small enough to fit into a sprint. A group of stories can be gathered together to form one story theme; for example bug fixes. Each bug doesn't require its own story but they can be lumped together to make a theme.

TESTABLE – A story must be verified before the end of a sprint. An agreement on what done means has to occur before each story is broken down into tasks. This is where Conditions of satisfaction come in; agreements of what is included in a completed User Story to consider it done. For example; As a designer, I want to have my chatacter jump across a gap to determine whether the mechanic is fun. CoS: Poses will be used in place of any animation

Collecting stories

Collecting stories in the product backlog is an ongoing process that occurs

throughout development.At the start of an agile project, the team and stakeholders collect enough stories to encompass all the major requirements (epics) known and enough detailed stories to enable the team to start iterating. A useful exercise is the story-gathering workshop brings stakeholders and teams together to brainstorm user stories for the game. At the first workshop, the major epics are identified. An example of an initial summary of epics for a first-person shooter might resemble the below;

If the teams confirm that they have the necessary specialists to accomplish work in these areas, then the workshop focuses on breaking out stories sized appropriately. When epics are broken down, smaller epics are revealed. A smaller epic for player control is below;

Some benefits of agile planning

Features are built in the order of the value they add for the consumers who buy the game. Delivering the highest-value playable features ahead of lower-value ones drives the development of the game rather than a preset ordered list of work.

Plan continually: Plans created at the start of a project are very good at telling us when the project has failed. Agile planning continually fine-tunes the course of the project to avoid pitfalls and to double down on valuable practices and features. They help teams find success.

The Product Backlog

The product backlog is a prioritized collection of user stories. Its goals are to do the following:

Enable stories to be prioritized so that the team is always working on the most important features

Support continual planning as the game emerges so the plan matches reality

Improve forecasts so that the stakeholders make the best decisions about the project goals

Every sprint they take stories off the top of the product backlog and break them down into small tasks that they estimate in hours. Defining the details of the highest priority stories is where most of the planning effort needs to take place.

Prioritizing the Product Backlog

Value: The value that a story adds for the player who buys the game

is the main criteria in determining the priority of that story on the

product backlog. The sprint team measure value using their own judgment, feedback from

focus testing, and feedback from stakeholders.

Cost: Cost is a key factor in the product owner’s ROI calculation.

Some highly desirable features might cost too much to implement.

Risk: Risk implies uncertainty about value and cost. Stories with higher risk are often

prioritized higher to refine a product owner’s understanding of value

and cost.

Knowledge: Sometimes the product owner doesn’t know the value,

risk, or cost of a feature. They simply need more information. In this

case, they could introduce a timeboxed story for a prototype or experiment

to the product backlog. This is the spike and it limits how much time the team spends working on it and is intended

to produce information alone.

Story points can also help the estimation process. Velocity is measured as the number of story

points accomplished every sprint. For example in modelling; one story point might be assigned to modelling a car - so therefore modelling two cars equals two story points. Modelling a character might be the equivalent amount of work; two story points. Projects need to define a set of numbers that they use for story point estimates. The two rules of thumb for selecting a set of story points are that the entire scale be within two orders of magnitude. For example, a range of 1 to

100 or a range of 1,000 to 100,000 works. This might work well for me (expecially at the start) as I'm not sure how long things will take but I'll have an idea of the effort required.

Release planning

This is where I'm at, so this diagram is relevant to me right now;

For many games developed using agile, there is still a need to separate some of the development activities.Most game development projects have stages regardless of whether they are agile or not. These stages change how teams develop the game:

Stages of Game Dvelopment

The framework used is still Scrum, but teams adjust the practices for the current stage.

Concept: This stage occurs before pre-production. Concept development is almost purely iterative. Ideas are generated, possibly prototyped, and thrown away on a regular basis. This stage is usually

timeboxed

Concept with Scrum: Sprints are shorter, and most of the stories in the very small backlog are spikes. The main goal of the conceptual stage is to create knowledge for the team and stakeholders, not value for the consumers. Release goals are concept treatments and perhaps a prototype

to demonstrate to stakeholders.

Pre-production: Teams explore what is fun and how they are going to build assets to support it during production. They also create levels and other assets that represent production quality. This stage is fully iterative and incremental.

Pre-production with Scrum: Scrum is used to discover the fun of the game and

incrementally and iteratively build value and knowledge about production

costs. Development is paced by sprints and releases. Release

goals are major features.

Production: The team focuses on creating an experience using the core mechanics and processes discovered during pre-production. Teams iterate less on core mechanics discovered during pre-production because they are building a great deal of assets based on them. It’s critical to discover and lock down such metrics during pre-production.

Production with Scrum: Teams produce assets that were identified in preproduction

and incrementally improve the asset pipelines. Although

sprints and releases are still used, the pace of asset production

becomes the metric for measuring velocity.

Post-production: With the content brought to shippable quality, the team focuses on polishing the whole game experience. This stage improves the game incrementally. Following this, the game is submitted to hardware testing.

Post-production with Scrum: Teams focus on tuning, polishing, and bug fixing

tasks they identify daily. The goals are driven more by the daily backlog (which includes bug

fixes and polishing tasks) and upcoming key dates such as submission.

Post-production starts on the alpha date and includes the beta and

shipping dates.

Some stages will overlap. For example, rather than an official “production start date,” teams see a

gradual buildup of production activities and a drop-off of pre-production work in the middle of the project.

Series of sprints = a release. A series of releases = a consumer ready game

a player driving past

a 10,000-polygon fire hydrant does not experience 50 times the value of a

200-polygon fire hydrant.

Glossary

BDUF = Big Design Up Front

Conditions of Satisfaction = which clarify the goal of a User Story it it's too ambiguous

Crunch = projects with loads of overtime

Emergent requirements = when stakeholders want more stuff added to the game during development

Feature Creep = Features being added to a project after the original scope is defined.

Iterative = repetition of a mathematical or computational procedure applied to the result of a previous application, typically as a means of obtaining successively closer approximations to the solution of a problem.

Kill-gate = a method of development where a number of prototypes are made but only one “top” one makes it through. The best wins and the others are stopped at the “gate” and “killed”.

Pre-production = to find the fun of the game that drives the production

Production = the stage where the team builds a few hours of content (characters / levels). Production fleshes out the story and surroundings to leverage the mechanics created in pre-production.

The author notes that for Carl Jung, “the fear of death emerged as the main source of neurotic misery only I the second half of human life within the context of a failure to fully accept the limits of one's future prospects, accomplishments and physical capabilities.” p1

Sepression, neurosis, sexual deviance can all be distilled down to fear of death in some way.

“Death anxiety [is] defined as the neurotic fear of the loss of self” p2 The author feels this complex is rooted in adjustment issues from childhood.

Thanatophobia = fear of death

Death anxiety is seen as some as an extension of castration anxiety. Others relate it to masturbation guilt, fear of darkness and seperation anxiety...this works for me as mt character will be in the dark and feel alone at the end.

Fear of annihilation of the personality is also a key thing to look into.

Fear of death is apparently more evident in people with high self esteem and drive as it represents and end to opportunities. Conversly it would seem to fit that thos with low self esteem would tend towards a more pessimistic view.

From an existential point of view, fear of death can be converned with the lack of meaning on one's life.

Are we more fascinated with death now than we have been before? Saw movies, terrorist videos, the speactacle of 9/11.

The book refers to research carried out on 19 prisoners on Death Row in Sing Sing prison, USA. Instead of death anixety being all around, prisoners were found to have developed different strategies of coping with it; denial, projecting delusion of innocence and focusing on hope; trying for an appeal, working towards making an appeal. Perhaps on this case, death anxiety can be most powerful when faced with imminent death.

The book was published in 1980 and the author acknowledges that the “currently popular absorption with spiritualism, devils, exorcism and witchcraft” is a product of fear of death. The mid to late 70s saw the release of films such as The Exorcist, The Amityville Horror, The Omen movies...

I read something interesting which I think would apply to my project. As it is, my research has indicated that there is plenty of anxiety about terrorism and attacks on home soil by radicalised religious extremists. These terrorists are totally committed and do not seem to fear death. American psychologist Herman Feifel believed that people can use religion to cope with the fear of death. Add to this, Freud claimed that religion can go some way to helping people assuage the fear of death. In fact, his research* indicated that “the more these subjects accepted fundamentalist religious ideas, the more they looked forward to death” p20.

*”Notes Upon a case of Obsessional Neurosis”, Standard Edition of the Works of Sigmund Freud.

Eros = the force of life / Thanatos = the force of death

Death can also be seen as a fear of confronting one's unconscious conflicts and problems in life.

MALE & FEMALE

Statistically, more women have been found to show a fear of death than men. No real explaination.

Some research indicates male death themes as, violence, frustration and failure (2 of which will definitely feature in the experience). Females as mourning and loss. The loss of self, the loss of the affection of important others.

AGE DIFFERENCES

Fear of death begins in childhood, broken down into three periods; 3-5, where its seen as a reversible departure with no distinction between the alive and the lifeless. 5-9, where death is personified as a thing that takes other people away. 10+, where it's seen as an irreversible end of things. More avoidance of death is seen in older people – I guess when people get older (as I know), we understand the value of life more  -or perhaps we feel we've accumulated “things” which we don't want to lose.

Some psychiatrists put the origins of Death Anxiety down to fear of abandonment by the mother. If the environment I create has enough symbolism in it to suggest being far way from home or the maternal embrace, then it'll serve things better.

Older people (geriatrics) representation of fear of death is seen through the loss of self; becoming slower mentally and physically, becoming more decrepit.

From 40 – 54, fear of death is seen through the ability to care for those left behind. However, age, sex and employment status offered no real difference in the approach to death anxiety.

SOCIOECONOMIC, DEMOGRAPHIC & EDUCATIONAL DIFFERENCES

Generally higher Iqs have a decreased fear of death compared to lower, less educated people. More equipped to confron the fears on a more philosophical level?

The book notes that psychoanalytic writers have said that “living fully demands awareness of and readiness for death.” p28. This would be the mindset of the character one would play in the VR experience, however as I've said, you are you in this experience, thats the whole point. Different “players” would view the experience differently.

In old tales and stories, being a hero means being free, free from anxieties of death – enabling one to have the courage to do heroic things.

EMOTIONAL DISTURBANCE & DEPRESSION

Death Anxiety relates to feelings of inadequacy, rejection and lack of productivity. Death fears are universal in personality typres ranging from normals, neurotics to psychotics, although it manifests itself differently in each. Theres a test called the DAS (Death Anxiety Scale) by Donald Templer http://donalditempler.com/ A version here which I should try http://wps.aw.com/bc_donatelle_access_10/61/15696/4018385.cw/content/index.html

He found that there is a positive connection between Death Anxiety and despression, as a result death anxiety has been treated with pharmeceuticals in order to calm it.

“Normal” types as the book refers to them are worried about lonliness and fear of the unknown at the door of death – mentally unstable types are concerned with punishment.

Book suggests that Death Anxiety emerged at the height of the Vietnam War (early to mid 70s) and the years afterwards. This relates to the research I previously carried out on horror cinema, which discovered that in the mid to late 60s America horror films on subjects such as the occult, supernatural and Satanism were popular.

DEATH ANXIETY IN THE DYING

What I've found so far is that the book doesn't have a “magic bullet”, there's no startling or revalatory differences between how a young person sees death against an older person., or how someone of lower intelligence sees death compared to someone of superior intelligence.

RELIGION AND THE FEAR OF DEATH

Freud summed up religion as the “aggregate projections of the child's emotional relationship to the father.” p83 Early man's view of God was that of an omnipotent being to whom they could seek protection from danger. This is a similar view that young children have of their father (in Freud's opinion). Religion fosters denial of death fears and also helps to “ease into” the acceptance of death via an individuals interaction within their religious community.

Insects

http://www.factzoo.com/insects.html

Q: How many insects are in the world? A: If you are talking about the number of different kinds of insects in the world, a good scientific estimate is that there are 1,017,018 species of insects in the world

The types of insects (orders) are:

Archaeognatha (bristletails)

Thysanura (silverfish)

Ephemeroptera (mayflies)

Odonata (damselflies and dragonflies)

Orthoptera (crickets and grasshoppers)

Plecoptera (stoneflies)

Grylloblattodea (rock crawlers)

Phasmotodea (stick and leaf insects)

Dermaptera (earwigs)

Mantodea (mantids)

Blattodea (cockroaches)

Isoptera (termites)

Embioptera (web-spinners)

Zoraptera (angel insects)

Psocoptera (barklice and booklice)

Phthiraptera (parasitic lice)

Hemiptera (bugs)

Thysanoptera (thrips)

Megaloptera (dobsonflies and alderflies)

Rapdhidioptera (snakeflies)

Neuroptera (antlions and lacewings)

Coleoptera (beetles)

Strepsiptera (strepsipterans)

Mecoptera (scorpionflies)

Siphonaptera (fleas)

Diptera (flies)

Trichoptera (caddisflies)

Lepidoptera (moths and butterflies)

Hymenoptera (bees, wasps, ants, sawflies)

Insects have an exoskeleton, three body segments - the head, the thorax, and the abdomen. The head is where you find all the sensory organs - the eyes, ears, mouth and antennae. The thorax is where all of the insect's legs and wings are attached. The abdomen is where the insect digests its food and where its reproductive organs are located. Most insects have 2 pair of wings, but some have one pair like flies.

Q: Do insects have blood and do they bleed when they are hurt? A: Insects have blood, but it's not like our blood. Our blood is red because it has hemoglobin, which is used to carry oxygen to where it is needed in the body.Insects get oxygen from a complex system of air tubes that connect to the outside through openings called spiracles. So instead of carrying oxygen, their blood carries nutrients from one part of the body to another. They do bleed when they are hurt, and their blood can clot so they can recover from minor wounds.

Not all insects drown in water. In fact, quite a few live there for at least part of their lives. Insects breathe through holes in the sides of their bodies. If they can't get air in through the holes, they will suffocate. 

This site has good video of many types of insect; http://greennature.com/article1899.html

“It is important... to consider horror cienma historically and culturally in order to determine how the horror film reflects and addresses the anxieties of the age.” p167

“Day of the Dead is about the crisis of masculinity in the wake of feminisim in the 1980s” p168

Cherry believes that the socio-political context of a horror film must be taken into account when exploring how they are read. “...cinema acts as a “barometer” reflecting the cultural climate”. P169

It addresses social anxieties

Mass society as an ideology can be seen as dominated by a small number of interconnected elites who control the conditions of life of the many, often by means of persuasion and manipulation.[3] This indicates the politics of mass society theorists- they are advocates of various kinds of cultural elite who should be privileged and promoted over the masses, claiming for themselves both exemption from and leadership of the misguided masses.[4]

In a mass society, power resides in large bureaucracies, leaving people in local communities with little control over their lives. - from WIKI

Cherry says that in modern horror, it is becoming more difficult to distinguish between the order / disorder models that Tudor was talking about. Why does horror work? A way of addressing / acknowledging anxieties in the safety of a 90 minute fictional representation. She goes on to say that fear of the monster / monstrous nemesis is a fear of others.  “The way other people and groups exhibiting markers of difference have been regarded and are depicted in their society.” p176 Like race, age, sexuality. That said, Cherry does say that it won't always be as easy as that; Candyman for example, may not be a straighforward race horror.

Interesteing that Nosferatu encodes Count Orlok as a Jew, who at the time was a hate figure in Germany as it was the Jew some held responsible for the humiliation of the Treaty of Versailles. Orlok has the negative characteristics eschewed by political cartoons of the time; hooked nose, hunched over, clasping hands of a money lender. P177. She says that this reading does not make the film anti-semitic, another way to read him is that he represents the phallus, with his extended appendages. She says that form this we can see that the audiences can apply an unconscious reading of racism into horror movies.

Malcolm X assassinated in 1965, Martin Luther King in 1968.

In using vampires as an example, Cherry hits upon something which describes the thrust of horror cinema. She says that vampires (standard mode, encoded as attractive and appealing) are often a reflection of the particular culture's attitudes towards sexuality. It can also be an idealised icon, making it something that certain “aspects of society and culture it needs to be for the time.” p 183 which would help to explain the phemonenal success of the new breed of vampire in the Twilight emovies. Horror films reflect the fears and anxieties of which the current culture is concerned with. Or rather they digest them and re-issue them as escapist entertainment, allowing us to grapple them in another way. Cherry remarks that The Blair Witch project has changed things, perhaps even the language of horror cinema. She refers to Bruce Newman (2008) for the Oakland Tribune, “Cloverfield mantra: It it's scary, get it on video” when he calls Cloverfield (and by extension all found footage movies) “The ultimate movie for people who don't feel a cataclysm has happened until they can videotape it, upload it and stream it live to the rest of the world.” Today, the real horrors of the world are brought to us via witness footage / video footage, ever since 9/11, our ability to process horrific imagery and spectacle through the medium of video has grown.

It's escalation. How can a horror film shock, scare and challenge its audience if it cant be more scary, shocking or challenging than footage being delivered on the news every night?

I've just watched Video Game - The Movie, a film that charts the origins and rise, fall, rise of the video game. It was pretty interesting but not groundbreaking, however, I thought there was something that kept getting referred to that I found interesting and relevant to my studies: people responded well to "becoming a character" and being "immersed" in a game. 

Industry veterans, players and experts all offered their points of view  on the successes and failures of games throughout the medium's history and the themes of immersion kept appearing. 

I very recently received my Oculus Rift DK2 and of course theres quite a lot to start to get through. One thing I was very curious about was a short horror movie called The Banshee Chapter. This is one of the first live action horror films for the VR headset. After having seen it I came away with a few things to think about when developing my own experience:

1. The audience likes to explore, so let them.

2. Having the camera lead the eyes of an audience is fine, but lead them somewhere there's value and on-screen content.

3. Perhaps having the viewer addressed directly would involve them more.