Project Summary
Part of the process of game development is production – the process of managing game development from a budget, staffing, and resource stance. Over the course of a few months, I spent extensive time working on a production bible for a theoretical game concept, which I dubbed “Dimensional Traffic.” The game is based on the 1999 board game “Road Trip,” where players must be the first to capture a certain number of pieces in order to win.
This production bible is meant to be the end-all collection of all documents that are necessary and relevant to producing a game. The project’s producers refer to and maintain this document at all times. Within this document are the following:
- The game’s Design Document (which took me a few days to do research for and complete).
- User Personas for design direction and marketing purposes.
- The Project Production Backlog, which identified the epics (broad content “milestones”), their descriptions, and their production priorities.
- The Methodology breakdown, which explained and visualized the production methodology I chose for Dimensional Traffic, including how stories (smaller parts of epics) would flow through the process.
- The Milestone Schedule, which used time estimates determined by staffing and research to build a timeline of production, identifying when client deliverables would be completed, what order tasks would be completed in, and so on.
- The Budgeting and Staffing Plan, which used prices, costs, and salaries taken from websites and through research to determine a budget necessary to develop and produce Dimensional Traffic.
Work and Credits
Everything within this document was written by me. Templates for the User Personas, Project Backlog, Milestone Schedule, and Budgeting and Staffing Plan were provided; the templates for the Milestone Schedule and the Budgeting and Staffing Plan were extensively altered by me to fit the formatting I wanted. All final formatting done to fit each document, including the spreadsheets, within the production bible was done by me.
Reflections
I began this project relatively unfamiliar with the process of producing a game. It was a learning process, and a slow process at that, as I spent long periods of time doing research for both the game concept I had chosen and the proper production processes that would fit this game. My toughest obstacle was, arguably, learning how to properly format certain documents – particularly Excel spreadsheets. Since all documents needed to eventually be compiled into a single PDF file, I needed a clear, efficient way to convert documents like the Milestone Schedule and the Project Backlog into chunks of information that could then be organized within the PDF. Excel page breaks were difficult to manipulate properly to get the results I desired, so I resorted to screenshots. The tool I used, ShareX, allowed me to take snippet screenshots of the exact same size, making file organization much neater. The result of three months of work is the 96-page production bible for Dimensional Traffic. There are certain aspects that could be improved – clearer screenshots for the spreadsheets, a full time scale for the Project Backlog, and some additional details for the Milestone Schedule, to name a few – but overall, I’m proud with how this document turned out.