WordFu Post-Mortem

We had a lot of fun putting WordFu together here. Here’s a few things that went well and not so well during production.

What went well

1 Establishing solid core gameplay early and staying faithful to it

WordFu benefitted a lot from having its core gameplay idea, using letter dice to create words, established from the get-go. We had a working version of the idea developed very early in the process. This gave us the luxury to think about the larger picture as far as theme, timing, and secondary gameplay elements were concerned.  It also allowed us to trim ideas and features that didn’t contribute to the core gameplay in some meaningful sense.
Some of our projects were started from a few ideas and features that sounded great on paper or on the elevator but were hard to develop fun, solid gameplay with strong compulsions. WordFu did not have that problem. Having something playable and fun very early in the development process is a huge boon.

2 Frequent communication and in-person visits

Our developers that we worked with, Demiurge Studios, were almost in constant communication with us on a daily basis. Even though we were 3 hours apart, our chat windows were almost always open. Initially, we had two teleconferences a week but that grew as time went on to almost daily. Confusion about design requirements, artistic feedback, or even contract data, was rectified quickly. If a big design is headed to your external developer, it always helps to schedule a phone call right after they read it to make sure what you expect them to build is what they think you want them to build.
Also, we had Demiurge’s lead developer on our project visit our offices for a week. When working with external developers, it’s invaluable to have some portion of time face-to-face to talk through any complex issue, whether it’s a design concept or getting help from our internal technical staff.

3 Integrating Mach Dice

Early on, we spent a lot of time trying to get the feel of rolling dice feel just right. Our goal was to have the dice feel just like they were from Mach Dice, an iPhone dice-rolling app that feels really snappy and great for our theme. To save time, we contacted Mach Kobayashi, the developer of Mach Dice and within weeks, we had his engine integrated into our game and we had exactly the feel we were going for.  The lesson here being that it’s actually pretty easy in the iPhone space to contact the developer of a target application and have what you need in a short amount of time.

4 Playtesting

Right around our Alpha milestone, we decided to hold a family and friends playtesting session in our office. We had all the major gameplay elements in place and wanted to know how easy it was for someone new to pick up and play the game. We had our first version of our tutorial in place at the time. The first five minutes alone were immensely valuable as we watched everyone struggle in different ways. Some of which we hadn’t thought would be a problem.
We took what we had learned from our playtesters’ behavior and added a much more obvious tutorial & video as well as changed the entire Versus play structure. It is almost never too early to playtest and gain incredibly useful feedback. You don’t have to wait until everything is in place to be reviewed.

What went poorly

1 Conflicting art direction

WordFu went through a few different visual themes in its quest to final. On the last major change though, we had a lot of confusion with some of the artistic direction. In addition to Demiurge’s internal artistic staff, we had conflicting opinion coming back from four different sources via various e-mail threads. This only resulted in no one getting exactly what they wanted and everyone getting confused. Afterwards, the problem was obvious. We decided on a strict feedback pipeline to avoid further miscommunication so we wouldn’t waste time and energy on unfruitful artistic design.

2 Changing deadlines & expectations

WordFu was originally slated to ship before the end of 2008.  For about two months, we were consistently growing the scope of the project as far as feature-set and quality level were concerned. However, we weren’t realistically setting our end date during this point. We were “two weeks from shipping” during this entire time.  This was largely a result of our company finding its expected quality level as we released titles like Rolando. These changing expectations left the development team with lower morale and trust as we continued to ask for the same amount of effort to final the game during regular production.  Having settled on our expectations for the future, it’s easier to predict the expected scope of our projects and communicate appropriately.