Mark Cerny describes the "Method"
Every Friday I post a video related to one of the themes of this site. This week it’s a talk about how to make big games.
At the D.I.C.E Summit in 2002 Mark Cerny presented his Method for successful game development. Around the same time that the orignal signatories of the Agile Manifesto documented the principles that they had discovered while making software, Cerny described something very similar and more concrete. He deliberately splits the pre-production and production processes of game development, because 1) they have two different outputs - a game design and then a game and 2) require different ways of working - pre-production is learning and prototyping, production is putting that learning into action. As Cerny puts it, production is easy, but pre-production is hard. Along the way Cerny busts many myths about development - planning, technology, milestones etc.
Twenty years later there is still a lot to learn from this talk.