Lean Game Development

Master Lean UX and Lean Startup techniques to improve your agile game development experience beyond Scrum. This updated version of the book focuses on applying lean and agile methodologies to the game development process and features improved examples, applied techniques, and a whole new section explaining how to test a game in Unity with CI. 

You’ll see how to define a minimum viable product (MVP) for games with Lean Canvas, allowing customers to iterate over it and collect feedback for improvement at every cycle. All of these are achieved while still using standard Agile techniques. The first part of the book explains the ideation process of a game and how lean methodologies allow developers, especially small studios, to avoid scope creep. Next, it it provides guidance on creating MVPs and using player feedback to iterate and improve games. The book then discusses continual improvement (CI) methods. A crucial part of CI is generation of Lean Canvas. 

Lean Game Development, Second Edition shows you how to iterate until you develop a game that satisfies developers, gamers, and your studio’s financial goals.

What You’ll Learn

• Study lean and agile methodologies to enhance the game development process 
• Find out how to improve the way game productions define value and iterate over it
• Apply development strategies to enrich the game development process

Who This Book Is For

People from all sectors of the gaming industry will find the book useful in planning their project in a more iterative way, unloading the management burden on the development process and collecting feedback to improve the game content as early as possible. 

Table of Contents

Chapter 1: Introduction

Chapter 2: First Steps with Lean

Chapter 3: An Inception in Practice

Chapter 4: MVPs: Do We Really Need Them?

Chapter 5: MVPs in Practice

Chapter 6: Generating Hypotheses

Chapter 7: Test-Driven Development

Chapter 8: Continuous Integration

Chapter 9: The World Between Design and Build

Chapter 10: Test, Code, Test

Chapter 11: Measuring and Analyzing

Chapter 12: Creating Ideas for Iterating

Chapter 13: Consolidating Knowledge Before Expanding

Chapter 14: More About Games

Chapter 15: Automated Testing with Unity

Chapter 16: Testing Gameplay

About the Author

Julia Naomi Rosenfield Boeira has been a software engineer for over a decade, focusing on Game Development and Online Service. Currently, she works as a team lead at Ubisoft; previously she worked as an online engineer. She has also worked with premium agile consultancy companies such as Thoughtworks and is extremely active on GitHub with focus on Game Development and Rust.