PressOK: Team Autonomy Cut iPhone Development Time In Half

Author: by Staff

As part of its latest Gamasutra feature, PressOK vice president of engineering Alex Koloskov, describes how the company's policy of letting teams work on side projects results in hits -- developed in half the time. The company booted up a "Rogue Development Project" program, hoping to channel developers' personal inspiration into marketable games. Koloskov writes, "The idea is simple: let our developers spend a certain amount of their time working on whatever game idea they want. If the resulting ideas or prototypes fit our broad product strategy, they become full-scale projects, led by the developer or team who came up with the idea. He also points to the company's successful iPhone game Finger Physics as an example of that policy paying off. While the intial prototype left a lot of room for improvement, the nature of the Rogue Development program motivated the developers to work fast and hard on the project. "[Developers] Agafonov and Voinov took our feedback and ran with it, all while completing development on other projects. Three weeks later, they provided us with an updated build that integrated all of the suggestions, including multiple game modes and addicting gameplay -- needless to say, they quickly changed our opinion of the game," writes Koloskov. "Outside of a few suggestions, we left the development, art, and game play entirely up to Agafonov and Voinov and the team working on the game," he writes. "Giving this amount of leeway would lead to a more invested development team and, ultimately, a better game." "In the case of Finger Physics, this process worked wonders. Once the game went in to full production the total development time was approximately three months, versus six months for a typical development cycle," he concludes. The full feature -- live now on Gamasutra -- goes into greater depth on the game's evolution, and also explores the different considerations the team was forced to explore to make the game stand out on the App Store.