Agile Game Development: Build, Play, Repeat, 2nd Edition

Chapter 7

The Product Backlog

When we start working on a game, it’s natural to want to know what we are going to make. That perhaps sounds pretty obvious, but it takes effort to achieve. Without a shared vision of the goal, everyone would start developing a game with separate points of view.

But we often go too far. We create design documents that have hundreds of pages that describe the mechanics of the game and the levels and characters in great detail. If you’ve ever worked on a game that had a large design document written up front, ask yourself:

• How closely did the finished game resemble the original design?

• If the document evolved with the emerging game, was it a good artifact to communicate those changes (that is, a “living document”)? ...