ninjabee.com

I wanted to ask about the way in which you guys move from one project to the next, since you're an indie developer without hordes of employees to throw around. (And since a little bird told me there is a third XBLA game in the works...)

Are you always focusing on only one project at a time or do you guys have your fingers in a bunch of different pies at the same time?

How much overlap is there between the project's development cycles?

How often do you sit down to "dream up" new game ideas or what your next project will be? Is it near the end of your current project, near the beginning, or in the middle?

How long is the "typical" (if that's even an applicable word) development cycle for NinjaBee? Does it vary widely or it generally the same?

We've got about 5 projects of various sizes we're working on right now at Wahoo/NinjaBee. Keep in mind that we continue to do contract work (as Wahoo) and indie stuff (as NinjaBee).

We're doing a PC title (with a pretty big team), Cloning Clyde, another XBLA game, a contract job for a cool publisher, and a PC Piano teaching game (which we have only one guy working on currently). These come and go in intensity - for instance, the publisher project is held up by other things right now, so I'm using most of that team for the other XBLA game. We're still pretty small, and use contractors where we can, but we're very busy and a lot of people do more than one job.

Overlap is extremely hard to manage, especially with full-time employees rather than contractors. We try to schedule projects to finish and start in synch, but it never works out that way. I think this is a pretty common management problem.

Right now, Clyde (which isn't quite done yet) gets a lot of attention, but when it's done we'll shift people around a bit.

We almost never sit around and dream up ideas (though there were a few times last summer when the power went out and we had nothing better to do...). Usually, new project ideas and focuses come and go while we're working on our active projects. We've got a lot of ideas in the pipe, and we sometimes do short prototypes of some key ideas to see how they play out.

The project cycle definitely depends on the job, but as a studio the only game we've worked on for more than a year is the Piano game, which we just keep working on and doing occasional releases for. We did some early contract projects (like script writing and movie rendering) that were shorter than 2 months, but all the full games we've worked on have been at least 6 months, I think. I really enjoy the short schedules. Many of us worked on longer bigger-budget stuff before coming to Wahoo, and while it had its appeal, it's nice to not have to be married to the same project for so long you get sick of it. There are some great advantages to being able to explore a new idea and then move on...

Thanks for the cool questions! I hope this is what you were looking for...

-- stay

Very interesting, so what part of the projects do you usually outsource to contractors?

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I'm a leaf on the wind, watch how I soar.

We outsource modeling and texturing, primarily. We also outsource music and sound effects. It's amazing how many freelance audio people are out there looking for work, so we've always got available people for that.

Programming tasks are a lot harder to parcel out to contractors, so we do almost all of that here, and management/design/level building all happens here.

Finally, for both XBLA games so far we've used VMC for testing and helping with the certification process.

-- stay

bloody hell...


I think you guys need a couple more mods

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I'm a leaf on the wind, watch how I soar.

I agree. Or block guest.

Agreed, 2 days ago they went from useless spam to advertising porn.

Once the spammers find an "unprotected" open message board such as this one, they'll flood it.

It definitely sucks. I could block guest access, but these posts are from bot-created non-guest accounts, so that wouldn't help.

What do most forums do to solve this? What would annoy you guys the least?

-- stay

captcha images
not email verification

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ninjabee.com

I think email verification would actually help, if you set it up so that the same email cannot be used twice. That'll get rid of the simpler bots.

There is also the other method of setting up randomly generated numbers that have to be duplicated, but since this is a phpBB forum, I'm not sure you have that level of customization ability.

Or the easier way of setting up more moderators.

Edit: This may help you if you can run bots:

http://www.phpbb.com/phpBB/viewtopic.php?t=393503

This is getting a bit ridiculous o.0

Yeah, what happened? The intensity of spamming went through the roof recently...

I haven't looked at the solution you linked to yet - insanely busy the last few days...

-- stay

Insanely busy you say? >_>

I dont suppose thats due to the upcoming release of a certain something?

And as for the increase, you probably just got signed up to some spam list.

Putting the last finishing touches on Clyde is very stressful. The rest of the team (primarily John) is doing most of the hard work on Clyde, but this and other stuff piling up at work might kill me in the next couple of weeks.