Design Tutorial – How to write a feature brief

The simple truth of game development is that a finished game will never be all that you imagine it to be. Even the best managed game development processes result in a game that represents 5 to 10 percent of the initial ambition. Ideas are cheap, implementation is expensive and at a certain point games must be shipped. For instance, even if my team’s current game Enhanced Wars is a runaway success and we continuously improve it for […]

Breaking into game design: Part 5 – prepare to interview

This article is the fifth in a series on how to land a job as a game designer. Check out previous posts for details on setting your career goal, building your portfolio, learning how to sell your experiences and writing your resume. If you’ve followed the series of articles up till now, then you’ve sent your resume and portfolio out to the world and are landing some interviews. The previous article on writing your resume covered the general process of phone and in […]

Balancing your game with tuning reports

To call the Quarter Spiral team process centric would be a bit of an understatement. Two of the three team members have served as producers of software development teams. We love scrum methodology and have been doing weekly sprints with point tracking and post mortems since the first week of our existence. As our tiny team is spread out across two continents, rooting ourselves in process has been essential to maintaining development momentum and creating trust that […]

Breaking into game design: Part 4 – write your resume

This article is the fourth in a series on how to land a job as a game designer. Check out previous posts for details on setting your career goal, building your portfolio and learning how to sell your experiences. Now that I’m devoting my energies to Enhanced Wars, I do not see nearly the quantity of resumes as when I was part of the hiring process at BioWare’s San Francisco office. But I still review the occasional resume for someone […]