Intro

Preface: This article was originally written and posted on my web site a few months ago. However, I figured I'd "rerelease" it as a feature article here, since the GameDev.net "Gauntlet Style Project" is starting up.

In this great land of game development, I've seen more than my share of death. If I had one dollar for every game development team I've seen fail, I could afford to program games full time!

It's always a sad thing when a group goes down for the count, but too often we forget to ask "Why." It's too easy to say that every dead development team died because of "lack of dedication." There are many circumstances where all the dedication in the world won't help the situation. By carefully looking at my own experience with now-dead development teams, I've come up with several ideas about why teams fail, and what can be done to prevent them from dying.

This first part will cover things that can go wrong during the "Idea" or "Design" phase, before actual development starts. The next part will cover things that could happen while in development, or after development.

And now, the ideas…

What Design Document?