I began the second day of my scrum experiment by watching more tutorials to learn the basics of Ableton. After watching enough videos that I felt comfortable feeling my way around the production environment, I began writing drums. I had not purchased a midi keyboard or audio interface yet, and drums were the best place to start with only a mouse and laptop keyboard for input. Historically, drums had been my biggest weaknesses when writing […]
Scrumification of Music – Day 1
I began the first day of my Scrum experiment by writing a one page work brief. The brief’s purpose is to set a clear intention and give a tool to measure quality of the end product. Writing a brief is a standard part of my game production process, but is an exercise I had never applied to music. The brief laid out a concept for the song I wanted to write, as well as an […]
What is Scrum?
Scrum is a project development framework frequently used in software development and specifically game development. It is an agile development method with a strong focus on visibility, accountability, team dynamics, quick pivots and finishing demoable product. It has been an essential tool at BioWare San Francisco for managing the breakneck pace of live game development, and has been transformative in my own time serving as a game producer. There are numerous resources throughout the web […]
Dragon Age Legends at GDC Online
In October of 2011, I gave a talk at Game Developers Conference Online entitled “Dragon Age Legends’ Road to 100k Likes”. You can watch the talk for free at the GDC Vault. Here is the description of the talk, which was presented in both the business and customer experience track: We live in a new world where borders between game developers and their players have broken down, where a Like can be more valuable then […]