GCG Feature: Big Hadron Games Mega-Postmortem -- 16 Flash Games In Three Months

Big Hadron Games took its name from the Large Hadron Collider -- but instead of smashing atoms, the masters student developers intended to smash together as many ideas as possible as quickly as possible. The result? 16 Flash games in three months -- and in its first mega-postmortem, GameCareerGuide goes inside the team's unusual working process. The aim of trying to build so many games in such a short period of time was to foster the concept of quick creation. The group of six first decided to work in pairs on games for a few months, and then choose which games would survive that initial process and be polished -- which meant few survivors from a large raft of initial ideas. By participating in the Global Game Jam, which has previously been covered on Gamasutra, the team learned that "quality games could be produced in as little as two days." After the Game Jam, BHg dropped its development cycle to one week, uppped its team size to three -- and was able to produce even better games, by its own estimation. This postmortem, which covers process and discovery much more than the trials and tribulations of a specific project, offers specific lessons learned from the process of creating so many games so quickly. One example is this bit of concrete wisdom: "It takes two dedicated developers a week to transform a new game idea into a playable prototype. It takes those two people another week to add enough depth to that prototype to turn it into a fun game." You can now read the entire postmortem, which contains a great deal of data on the group's games, along with screenshots, photos, and more, at Gamasutra sister site GameCareerGuide.