larly key to foster greater interaction among team
members and the product owner to drive creative
breakthroughs and then refine them, he says.
The risks of early-stage VR gaming projects are
great, but organizations can see the future of gaming
coming fast: VR game development projects are sure
to multiply as the new devices go mainstream. “We’ll
go from hundreds of thousands of potential users
to hundreds of millions as required graphics chips
become affordable on a mass scale,” says Neil Schneider, executive director of the Immersive Technology
Alliance, based in Whitby, Ontario, Canada.
It’s with that mass audience in mind that some
game developers are committing major resources
to VR projects now. As Mr. Schneider says, “right
now organizations have a golden opportunity to
experiment, because early adopters have reasonable
expectations of quality in the short term. It takes
three years to build a major game title that can drive
a big chunk of a studio’s revenues. So now is the
time to build skills and experiment.”
KNOWN UNKNOWNS
That was how Mindfield Games approached its
first project. The organization’s five co-founders,
all veteran game developers, were drawn to VR
after experimenting with an early Oculus Rift pro-
totype—and it gave them an idea for a game: an
“open-world” sci-fi adventure called P.O.L.L.E.N.
But applying a traditional project management
methodology to the development process was chal-
lenging. Not only were they experimenting with
new technology, but they didn’t know the specifica-
tions or release plans for the platform on which the
game would ultimately be released.
“We had a huge amount of unknowns,” says Olli
Sinerma, project lead and co-founder at Mindfield
Games, Helsinki, Finland. “On the positive side, our
team members are good at estimating their own
work and have the skills to see what the game will
be before actually implementing it.”
Given all the unknown variables, Mr. Sinerma
went with an agile scrum framework for the
project, with slight variations for the produc-
tion, marketing, outsourcing and testing teams.
Flexibility was key with untested technology. Mr.
Sinerma wanted “an agile system that could be
molded to fit each need.”
“Our team members are good at
estimating their own work and have
the skills to see what the game will
be before actually implementing it.”
—Olli Sinerma, Mindfield Games, Helsinki, Finland
Mindfield Games’
P.O.L.L.E.N.
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