All Late Projects Are the Same (2011) [pdf]
The first thing that comes to mind is Joel&#x27;s Five Worlds<p><a href="http:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.joelonsoftware.com&#x2F;articles&#x2F;FiveWorlds.html" rel="nofollow">http:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.joelonsoftware.com&#x2F;articles&#x2F;FiveWorlds.html</a><p>not all software dev is the same.<p>Coming from games, every project I&#x27;ve been on was an original title. That meant it was 100% up to the team to decide the scope of the game. Most teams (not all) guess how much they can get done and don&#x27;t plan for cutting features. &quot;We&#x27;re going to have 12 characters, 30 levels, 10 power ups, 45 enemies, 600 puzzles, online multiplayer, and IAP for 500 items&quot;. And then they just start making it. They run into 2 big problems.<p>1) They don&#x27;t know if the game will be fun until they&#x27;re 50-60% in. If they guessed wrong they&#x27;re off schedule<p>2) They&#x27;re attached to the vision and unwilling to cut stuff.<p>My point though is this doesn&#x27;t fit &quot;we didn&#x27;t start early enough&quot; IMO. They knew how much time they had. No one was&#x2F;is dicating too much work. They can cut the scope at any time. But they rarely do.<p>There are solutions. 1 is to prototype with a small team. Unfortunately most teams can&#x27;t do that as they&#x27;d have 90% of their staff doing nothing. Larger companies can do this or maybe if they switched to the Hollywood model, no employees only contractors, they could do it.<p>2 is to design so things can be cut and to check the schedule and start cutting. This one is hard for most teams because they see the game they imagined in their minds and it&#x27;s not the game with stuff cut. Players though don&#x27;t know what that vision is and so won&#x27;t missed the cut features because they aren&#x27;t aware of them.