Skip to main content

Agile Game Development: Magicka

Update 2011.05.09: Arrowhead posted a reply to this post.

This post is a tribute to a company which, judging by the looks of it, is kicking ass, agile style.

"This sprint is really going down the drain" from the first scene
of Magicka in adventure mode.
What's this about
The company is called Arrowhead Game Studios, and they've made a game called Magicka.

Now, I'm not going to write so much about the game itself, but it's awesome. I used to play a lot of computer games growing up, all the way through my studies. Since then, it's been pretty sporadic. Until I tried out Magicka. I've been playing it for over 50 hours, which is pretty good value-for-money, considering it cost 10€ (plus DLC's, which are a point I'll come back to later).

How successful is it?
In the first 17 days it was for sale, it sold over 200.000 copies. At times it topped the stats for most-selling game on Steam, at one point selling 30.000 copies in 24 hours. Its gotten pretty good reviews all round, and some rather high ranking game reviewers have completely fallen for the game.

Take into account that this is an indie game which was/is developed by eight Swedish students turned game developers. The only other game I've heard of that comes close to this phenomenon is Minecraft.

Why is it agile?
They ship early and they ship often.

Early because they launched the game while it was still early alpha and crap-full of bugs. Often, cause after they went live on Steam they were patching on a daily basis (the Steam automatically upgrades the game, a bit like the Windows update). Since then they've eased down to more of a weekly release cycle.

Now for those of you who haven't been playing a lot of computer games lately, to me this is pretty radical. A big "Hollywood" game usually takes weeks to produce their first (well needed) patches, some times even months.

Lots of people have been complaining about the instability of the game and the bugs from early on. Then again, so do many big budget games. For a small company of eight developers, it's hard to keep coverage of all possible hardware drivers and configurations, so this is understandable. 

But they fix the problems continuously. These releases are pumped out so regularly that I hardly notice them anymore. They've gotten really good at not letting new bugs slip through. This is continuous delivery.

Humble, Open and Honest
The developers seem incredibly involved with their users. As an apology for the early buggy releases of the game, they released a new avatar in: The Mea Culpa Wizard (granted some new magical powers: summon bugs, and the spell Crash To Desktop). By now you can probably guess that there's a lot of geek humor in there.

They communicate frequently with the world through twitter and forums. They often take in suggestions from players into patches and new changes. They post release notes and weekly community updates.

They are honest, continuously maintaining a list of things they know are still buggy. They admit it when they mess up and they apologize. They say thanks when they get feedback.

Even though I've never met them, it feels like the developers are practically my buddies, eager to understand and help me have the best possible gaming experience.

I really had to smile when I saw the Scrum board from the first scene in the game (see screenshot in the top of this post). I mean, how many gamers out there know what Scrum is? That is clearly a wink to other devs out there :)

Pay per use
Its important for the developers to keep the players happy, and keeping them playing, also after that they bought the game. They've shipped some downloadable content, some of it is free, others cost a few euros.

I bought the game for 10€. I then bought the Vietnam extension for 5€, and then I *had* to get the latest level as well for a meager 2€. Later on they are going to release Player-vs-player mode (PvP) for free, due to heavy demand among the fans.

They are tip-toeing the fine line of keeping players paying for more, while not giving the impression that they are exploiting (like some other games have tried).

Courage
Arrowhead have really challenged a lot of the existing conventions in the gaming industry. They heavily under-priced (games are usually 30-50€). They launched the game without a 6 month QA period. They did no traditional marketing (apart from getting on Steam, which was probably a big part of the lift-off). They sit down to play and discuss the game, while streaming it online. It's a spelled-based game where there is no mana-bar, for crying out loud!

Rounding off..
The XP values are Communication, Feedback, Simplicity, Courage and Respect. I think these really ring through every time I have read on the forums. Just to paste some quotes from their change log announcements:

From early on:
Right now we've got so many players posting on the steam forums we're having a hard time keeping up answering posts. But we're reading all of them and are adding stuff to our "to-do"-list. [...] We'll monitor your response closely and keep patching the game as often as possible. Please let us know if the patch helped!
Later on:
We (devs and publisher) are still super committed to fix stuff that's broken and make sure you guys can have a great time with the game. Additionally we've also have a bunch of improvements planned and will be patched in as soon as the major issues are out of the way! These are based directly off your input.
Later:
As we've released new patches we're seeing much fewer reports of the game malfunctioning. More and more players are reporting that the game is working nicely for them. We're also noticing that the problems that exist are A) known and being worked on and B) centered around fewer different things. 
And then things are really becoming stable:
So the last patch squashed a lot of bugs and we're glad to report that we're getting fewer error reports and the reports we're getting are about a smaller number of problems.
So we're definitely getting where we want to go! BUT that doesn't mean we're done. We'll keep updating the game and improve it as we go along. We will also try to add additional features that you guys are requesting. 
And since then they've done another ten patches. This is agile straight out of the book (or into it, depending on how you look at it). Really inspiring to see how successful they are.

Update 2011.05.09: Arrowhead posted a reply to this post.

Comments

  1. Ferris,

    Good post! I agree with the values you enjoyed, but wanted to point out that XP done correctly (including TDD practices) should not result in early releases full of bugs. You're not truly releasing something if it requires patches to finish features. XP focuses on prioritized customer value, which includes stability. This is not to say they are not doing XP, but they should be modifying/improving their practices to ensure they keep up the early/frequent releases that are more stable.

    Clinton Keith
    Author, Agile Game Development

    ReplyDelete
  2. Hi Clinton, thanks for the comment!

    Wow, I had no idea there's a book on the subject, with the exact same title even :)

    You're right about that, of course. And the developers openly admit this in retrospect (listening to their vods with Total Biscuit you pick up a lot of interesting facts).

    I think all the way through, the devs acted to the best of their knowledge (probably some pressure from the publisher), and as as soon as they realized that quality was below par for the general public, they adapted: focused on increasing stability, daily releasing patches to remove bugs.

    An interesting example of this is here, quoting from these release notes:

    We've got a new patch for you! It'll take care of Friday's patch that was...less than stellar... Again, we're terribly sorry for the inconvenience. We'll make it up to you...promise!

    I can also tell you that we're putting a new patching/testing/verification procedure in place to avoid additional f-ups. We'll talk more about that in a future community update!

    (end quote)

    Even though their values seem to be in the right place, I'm not sure if these devs did, or do TDD, or continuous integration. Would be interesting to find out! I'll give them a tweet, or a post in their forum.

    ReplyDelete
  3. it was realy wonderful blog..!

    ReplyDelete

Post a Comment

Popular posts from this blog

Open source CMS evaluations

I have now seen three more or less serious open source CMS reviews. First guy to hit the field was Matt Raible ( 1 2 3 4 ), ending up with Drupal , Joomla , Magnolia , OpenCms and MeshCMS being runner-ups. Then there is OpenAdvantage that tries out a handful ( Drupal , Exponent CMS , Lenya , Mambo , and Silva ), including Plone which they use for their own site (funny/annoying that the entire site has no RSS-feeds, nor is it possible to comment on the articles), following Matt's approach by exluding many CMS that seem not to fit the criteria. It is somewhat strange that OpenAdvantage cuts away Magnolia because it "Requires J2EE server; difficult to install and configure; more of a framework than CMS", and proceed to include Apache Lenya in the full evaluation. Magnolia does not require a J2EE server. It runs on Tomcat just like Lenya does (maybe it's an idea to bundle Magnolia with Jetty to make it seem more lightweight). I'm still sure that OpenAdvant

Considerations for JavaScript in Modern (2013) Java/Maven Projects

Disclaimer: I'm a Java developer, not a JavaScript developer. This is just what I've picked up the last years plus a little research the last days. It's just a snapshot of my current knowledge and opinions on the day of writing, apt to change over the next weeks/months. We've gone all modern in our web applications, doing MVC on the client side with AngularJS or Ember , building single-page webapps with REST backends. But how are we managing the growing amount of JavaScript in our application? Yeoman 's logo (not necessarily the conclusion of this blog post) You ain't in Kansas anymore So far we've just been doing half-random stuff. We download some version of a library and throw it into our src/main/webapp/js/lib , or we use it from a CDN , which may be down or unreachable when we want to use the application.. Some times the JS is minified, other times it's not. Some times we name the file with version number, other times without. Some

Managing dot-files with vcsh and myrepos

Say I want to get my dot-files out on a new computer. Here's what I do: # install vcsh & myrepos via apt/brew/etc vcsh clone https://github.com/tfnico/config-mr.git mr mr update Done! All dot-files are ready to use and in place. No deploy command, no linking up symlinks to the files . No checking/out in my entire home directory as a Git repository. Yet, all my dot-files are neatly kept in fine-grained repositories, and any changes I make are immediately ready to be committed: config-atom.git     -> ~/.atom/* config-mr.git     -> ~/.mrconfig     -> ~/.config/mr/* config-tmuxinator.git       -> ~/.tmuxinator/* config-vim.git     -> ~/.vimrc     -> ~/.vim/* config-bin.git        -> ~/bin/* config-git.git               -> ~/.gitconfig config-tmux.git       -> ~/.tmux.conf     config-zsh.git     -> ~/.zshrc How can this be? The key here is to use vcsh to keep track of your dot-files, and its partner myrepos/mr for o

What I've Learned After a Month of Podcasting

So, it's been about a month since I launched   GitMinutes , and wow, it's been a fun ride. I have gotten a lot of feedback, and a lot more downloads/listeners than I had expected! Judging the numbers is hard, but a generous estimate is that somewhere around 2000-3000 have listened to the podcast, and about 500-1000 regularly download. Considering that only a percentage of my target audience actively listen to podcasts, these are some pretty good numbers. I've heard that 10% of the general population in the western world regularly listen to podcasts (probably a bit higher percentage among Git users), so I like to think I've reached a big chunk of the Git pros out there. GitMinutes has gathered 110 followers on Twitter, and 63, erm.. circlers on Google+, and it has received 117 +'es! And it's been flattr'ed twice :) Here are some of the things I learned during this last month: Conceptually.. Starting my own sandbox podcast for trying out everythin

Git Stash Blooper (Could not restore untracked files from stash)

The other day I accidentally did a git stash -a , which means it stashes *everything*, including ignored output files (target, build, classes, etc). Ooooops.. What I meant to do was git stash -u , meaning stash modifications plus untracked new files. Anyhows, I ended up with a big fat stash I couldn't get back out. Each time I tried, I got something like this: .../target/temp/dozer.jar already exists, no checkout .../target/temp/core.jar already exists, no checkout .../target/temp/joda-time.jar already exists, no checkout .../target/foo.war already exists, no checkout Could not restore untracked files from stash No matter how I tried checking out different revisions (like the one where I actually made the stash), or using --force, I got the same error. Now these were one of those "keep cool for a second, there's a git way to fix this"situation. I figured: A stash is basically a commit. If we look at my recent commits using   git log --graph --