EWA lessons learned

Filed under Design Diary on April 14, 2008
Keywords: beta testing, Eternal Warlords, project management

Time management has never been my strong suit. My natural inclination is to procrastinate. This proclivity is aggravated as a project’s timeline extends. Maiden of Pain clearly established a threshold of one year for me. It requires a monumental effort of will on my part to generate energy and enthusiasm for a task after that point (milestones and similar signs of success are great aids in this area).

We’re a year and a half into the development of Eternal Warlords: Arena.

I kept on the ball the first three to four months, holding regular (weekly or bi-weekly, as needed) meetings with the artist to review progress and resolve issues. Dates and deliverables were always a part of the conversation.

Things got quite a bit looser when work with Figbox began. There are a few factors behind this that I’ve identified. Perhaps the biggest one was the lack of milestones.

In constructing the contract with Figbox, we broke the project into components with delivery dates. For legal reasons, the components were described at a fairly high level. As any competent project manager will tell you, good milestones are concrete, made up of a group of well-defined tasks with realistic deadlines. In this context, realistic means both that it’s actually possible to complete the task by the deadline, and that the deadlines are near enough that they seem real, not some ephemeral time in the far future. I gave Figbox neither of these. Without them, a project manager has no teeth.

I corrected that this past Friday. Chris and I met with Figbox and established some clear milestones with hard dates behind them. I even started using a web-based PM solution, though this site has me rethinking it as a long-term solution for Goldbox.

What this means to you is that we will have a Beta1 version of Eternal Warlords: Arena ready for testing on May 21, 2008.

This wasn’t my only lesson learned on this project. Come back Wednesday and I’ll share another one.

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