After a long process of research, design and planning Convolution is pleased to announce the release of the Game Business Toolbox, and office productivity (read templates) product focused on meeting the needs of game developers and game business planners. You can find the product at: http://www.convolutioninc.com/Toolbox
Ok, so this is the convolution blog, so rather than continue to re-iterate the marketing info, let me instead describe the how and why’s of the Toolbox.
I started in indie game development back in Jan 2008, and coming from a professional IT services background, the first things I went looking for was tools, books, and templates in that order. I found some great tools. I found some great, some good, and some not so good books. But… despite being referenced everywhere, I found only a few Game design document templates, one technical design document template, and articles discussing how I might make a design document (of varying quality).
At the time I read the standard “every game is too unique to standardize design docs” commentaries, and thought.. welll, they’ve been doing this longer than me, so I guess… and went on my merry way.
Ok, fast forward a couple of years, and here’s what I saw:
1) game design is no less complex than business application design, and no more complex. Different, in some ways, identical in others.
2) games need as much attention to design as any other retail computer application (more given consumer expectations)
3) many, many game projects fail… period
4) many successful game projects, fail at the business of game development (which usually ends the studio responsible)
So, I sat down and analyzed the reasons, using standard business and standard business IT approaches. Here’s what I found:
1) in business IT consulting there are some tools/methodoligies for measuring the maturity of a businesses IT practices (both development and infrastructure). I personally prefer CMMI, but there are others. The idea behing these is that some IT companies and departments survive and even thrive based solely on the specific people involved (their skills, team dynamic, heroic efforts, etc…). Most companies, however, need maturity to be viable long term. After reading and analyzing many post-mortems, blog entries, etc… the result was that most game studios are CMMI level 0 (or 1 in the new system). They succeed or fail, nearly entirely based on the team involved. If any key members or enough members leave, the studio often stagnates or dies entirely.
2) Historically, game studios have been able to operate with little internal or formal business practice. What does exist was grafted on after producing a great game. This phenomon seems to be related to the traditional role of publishers, who often take responsibility of the majority of the business/marketing end of business operations for their studios. I also saw things were changing. More and more, industry professionals were branching out as independents, and more new independents were cropping up (particularly around mobile iOS and casual game portal development). Add that to changing markets for publishers, and greater pressure to succeed for “in-house” studios, and the need for better business tools that people could use seemed to stand out. I know I was feeling the need for something.
So, I started to make office templates. Initially for my business. If there’s one thing that gets undervalued but ends up being needed over and over in professional services it’s standard templates. Especially “sanity check” types, where you can make sure you’re not forgetting anything.
It wasn’t easy, first I had to re-think game design. Games seem to be designed with “all-in-wonder” Game Design Docs (GDD), with some recommending a Technical Design Document. I started down that road, but quickly realised that this was like trying to “boil the ocean”. And wasn’t in-line with things I do every day in business IT (I’m an IT architect most days 
). So, I applied my experience and IT industry best practices, then consulted with specialists I know in graphic design, User Interface/Usability/User experience design, software architecture and design, and so on… All the while cross-referencing with the best books and articles I could find on game design. I was surprising how many different types of documents were referenced with no examples, no real structure proposed, nothing but the standard “do this, but .. oh, every game is special, so there are no standards”.
As I progressed, it occurred to me that there are likely others who would benefit from these, so I documented each document as though someone else was going to use it. I “ate my own cooking” and used each template myself, as much as possible, to prove they worked and actually helped. I made changes, and tried again.
The end result was 24 office templates (12 game design, 12 business planning) and a guide. Given the history of the industry, I had no real way to know how the established industry professionals would respond to the product. It’s been just a few days (and in an awkward season I’ll admit), but the response has been generally positive.
Well, that’s the “behind the scenes” story of the product.
Cheers,
Galen
