With doing comes learning

In the second half of 2008, ngmoco worked with several partners to release 5 games – MazeFinger, Topple, Dr. Awesome, Dropship & Rolando - to the App Store. As a new company working in a new market on a new platform, we had more opportunity to learn from our new endeavors than we knew what to do with.

We learned some great project management lessons in 2008 that will help make our games - and the way we develop them - even better in 2009. 

The highlights:

• Lesson 1: Games make incredible progress per hour, not week! The speed of iPhone development is incredible. 1-2 guys can close 50 bugs a day. It takes minutes to make and distribute a new build with a new feature. Timelines are measured in single digit months, and games progress incredibly quickly every day.  ngmoco completed 5 games in less than 6 months! Great games can be built incredibly fast with just a couple of people.

• Lesson 2: Demonstrating functionality on screen quickly & iterating often allowed us to pinpoint which designs were (or weren’t) working. One partner said, “While we clearly went through a ton of iterations between [start] and ship, having the game up and running early gave everyone something to try and know that the core mechanic would work well on the iPhone.” In cases where the mechanic wasn’t working, we iterated quickly and often until the right implementation was found or the feature was cut.

• Lesson 3: Talking frequently is hugely important when working with people who don’t sit near you. Daily calls on Rolando meant the U.K.-based Simon and San Francisco-based ngmoco were always in sync. Another project relied heavily on IM. Regardless of the method, the key was that everyone was always talking! Surprises were minimal. Of course, there is no such thing as perfect communication so we did have a couple of instances of confusion. The best way to avoid that confusion: talk often, never assume something is obvious, and ask when there is doubt.

• Lesson 4: There are times when talking frequently should be replaced with face-to-face talking. Developers temporarily working from ngmoco’s San Francisco office during the final stage of the projects were a huge win. One developer said, “Being able to talk through issues as they came up reduced the turn around time and let us work through tasks a lot faster than we would have been able to otherwise.”

• Lesson 5: Don’t forget about localization. We didn’t consider the localization pipeline enough, which caused headaches and re-work. In our first projects –MazeFinger and Topple – we didn’t start translation until days before submission. Our next project started in plenty of time, but we failed to provide enough contextual detail upfront to ensure that translators got us the right translations.  For example, Dr. Madison – a Dr. Awesome character - was assumed to be a man. She isn’t.

• Lesson 6: Marketing a game is a lot of work. At ngmoco, we take the marketing task just as seriously as we take making great software.  The work to market a game (logos, screenshots, trailers, web pages, etc) is no small task. We’re a small team and we split up the work as best we could. We had a company founder making icons. We had people put in a lot of overtime to put together game play videos.

Kristine Coco
Director of Operations