Identifying more project scope as an Indie

Last time I made story cards for each feature of the game. I didn't want to be too high level nor did I want to be too fine grained. I wanted to get a good sense of the scope of what's left in my project.

I ended up with a stack of cards that was way thicker than the set I made a year ago for the entire project (which shows how badly I estimated the project last time). I then broke off a small subset that I identified as the minimum set of features to get the alpha released.

I'm Gianfranco, and I run GBGames at http://www.gbgames.com/
Twitter: @GBGames

Category:

Gaming

Tags:

• indie
• agile

[GBGamesVideos]

@pmendes99 Absolutely. What's helpful about the technique I described is that you've identified all features without wasting a lot of time designing them up front, and it's easy to figure out what features you think are critical and what aren't. You can simply move the index cards around in front of you. It's a great, tactile aid in the type of planning decisions you described.

[pmendes99]

I'm also struggling with completing projects in my estimated timeline. I'm currently thinking that it's a good exercise to start savagely cutting features and simplifying the design if I see that it's taking too long and won't make the deadline (in the case of meeting the deadline being more important than matching the initial design).