High Moon Makes Top 50 Innovators List
IT Week says they belong there.
Published: December 13, 2005
Darkwatch developers High Moon Studios certainly haven’t minded tooting their own horns over the past couple months, but with all the awards they’ve been getting as of late, who can blame ‘em? The San Diego-based publisher managed to land a spot on IT Week’s Top 50 Innovators of 2005, itself an accomplishment, but even more impressive when you learn they were the only video game company that made it onto the list.
The recognition comes at the heels of November’s 2005 Workplace Excellence Award, which also highlighted the team’s use of the rugby formation-derived Scrum method, an offshoot of Agile Methodology which can only be appropriately described with a massive cut and paste:
As a product R&D method, the formation is applied in spirit by promoting small non-hierarchal, interdisciplinary teams who work together to complete vertical slices of a project. Working in short cycles called sprints that last no more than 30-days, teams work to produce iterations of a project that can be demonstrated, tested and evaluated. Guided by the project’s broad objectives, Scrum gives its “customers,” such as publishers, the ability to define goals for each sprint. Teams are then given the ownership to achieve the goals, providing the framework for enhanced productivity during the course of a standard workweek.
See? Much clearer now, aren’t we?
“Agile Methodology is an ideal match to game development in many ways,” explains Clinton Keith, High Moon’s CTO. “It promotes an incremental and iterative approach to game development, where interdisciplinary teams of artists, designers and engineers focus on ‘finding the fun’ rather than working from design and technical documents. Scrum, one of the major agile management tools, promotes daily communication, team ownership and product value. The benefits to product quality and team productivity can be enormous. In this era of skyrocketing development costs across the industry, Agile Methodology is something we evangelize for the sake of the game development community.”
“We see High Moon as setting a timely trend in the video game industry,” opined Ken Durham, reviews editor of IT Week Magazine. “They clearly recognize, and have very creatively addressed the growing complexity of developing successful, mass market video games. We hope more people in the game industry are inspired to take notice of High Moon’s approach to game development.”
It will be interesting to see if other development houses can or will indeed adopt the same practices given all the attention High Moon’s take on it has drawn, or if it’s even possible these days given how entrenched some studios’ routines are. One thing’s for sure, though, we’ll be hearing more from High Moon about High Moon soon.
The recognition comes at the heels of November’s 2005 Workplace Excellence Award, which also highlighted the team’s use of the rugby formation-derived Scrum method, an offshoot of Agile Methodology which can only be appropriately described with a massive cut and paste:
As a product R&D method, the formation is applied in spirit by promoting small non-hierarchal, interdisciplinary teams who work together to complete vertical slices of a project. Working in short cycles called sprints that last no more than 30-days, teams work to produce iterations of a project that can be demonstrated, tested and evaluated. Guided by the project’s broad objectives, Scrum gives its “customers,” such as publishers, the ability to define goals for each sprint. Teams are then given the ownership to achieve the goals, providing the framework for enhanced productivity during the course of a standard workweek.
See? Much clearer now, aren’t we?
“Agile Methodology is an ideal match to game development in many ways,” explains Clinton Keith, High Moon’s CTO. “It promotes an incremental and iterative approach to game development, where interdisciplinary teams of artists, designers and engineers focus on ‘finding the fun’ rather than working from design and technical documents. Scrum, one of the major agile management tools, promotes daily communication, team ownership and product value. The benefits to product quality and team productivity can be enormous. In this era of skyrocketing development costs across the industry, Agile Methodology is something we evangelize for the sake of the game development community.”
“We see High Moon as setting a timely trend in the video game industry,” opined Ken Durham, reviews editor of IT Week Magazine. “They clearly recognize, and have very creatively addressed the growing complexity of developing successful, mass market video games. We hope more people in the game industry are inspired to take notice of High Moon’s approach to game development.”
It will be interesting to see if other development houses can or will indeed adopt the same practices given all the attention High Moon’s take on it has drawn, or if it’s even possible these days given how entrenched some studios’ routines are. One thing’s for sure, though, we’ll be hearing more from High Moon about High Moon soon.
