Co-Development: More Than Just Outsourcing

Rajesh RaoFounder & CEO

Dhruva Interactive

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About DhruvaIndia’s leading games services company with 15 year pedigree, delivered on 35+ AAA games

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What is Co-Development?

• Collaborative development of a game by Client and Partner from concept to delivery

• A ‘Virtual Team’ where the Partner compliments and/or supplements the capabilities of the Client– Compliments: e.g. a creative design agency with no

development team– Supplements: e.g. a 3 man dev team wanting to

accelerate the development cycle for better time-to-market

• Ownership of IP, Vision and marketing/launch (typically) vests with Client

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Selection a Co-Dev Partner

• Selecting your partner:– What is it that you need from a dev partner?– Understanding their strengths/weaknesses– Team profiles– Review of past work– Tests/pilot project ( could even be some pre-

production work)

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Setting up for Co-Development

Checklist:

• Project management

– Change management

• Communication Plan– Touchpoints, Roles/Responsibilities– Project Tracking– Collaboration Tools

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Setting up for Co-Development

• Project management:– project schedule, milestones, deliverables, change

management, Tracking – Roles/Responsibility– Acceptance/Signoff process

• Change management:– importance of the change – its impact on the modules already developed– impact on schedule and budget– Feasibility– value\cost analysis

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Setting up for Co-Development

• Communication Plan:– Scrum works best– process should clearly define on the important

information that has to be shared between teams and also the frequency at which this information has to be updated

– Identifying key people, establishing Points of Contact– Status Updates: e.g Gantt charts– Project mgmt tools: e.g. Basecamp, Jira

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Critical Success Factor: Pre-Production

• Clarity: Vision, scope, target audience of the game• Identify early and clearly communicate to your

Partner what’s still ‘fuzzy’• Thorough and clear Creative and Artistic

communication – need to elaborate with plenty of examples so that there’s no misunderstanding

• Share as much info as possible: – What existing games out there are you looking as

benchmarks (for game play mechanic, visual look/feel, overall user experience)

– What are your inspirations?• Risk Analysis: internal and external

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Co–Dev Best practices

• Flexibility: Co-development should be flexible and should encourage the expression of different points of view, while never losing sight of the goals that Client and Partner have originally identified as their shared objective.

• Don't be a control freak : Encourage self organized teams

• Creativity is heavily dependent on the freedom a team has to come up with ideas

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Co–Dev Best practices

• Provide frequent feedback, don’t wait till the end

• Always avoid blame game : everyone’s on the same side!

• Do your best to avoid crunch time. This has a very bad impact on creativity

• Look at building relationships not hierarchy

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Some examples of Co-Developed Games

Game / Title Year / Client Platform Description

2005I-Play

Mobile: Java and Brew

Was rated among the best tennis games on the mobile

GameSpot Review: 7.9 / 10

2006I-Play

Mobile: Java and Brew GameSpot Review: 7.3 / 10

2009GameTantra PC

A Match 3 style PC casual game developed for GameTantra

GameZebo rating 4/5

2009GameTantra

/ Curious Sense

PCA Hidden Object game, developed to promote the rock band REO Speedwagon.

Featured in the New York Times and Tonight Show

2011Gametantra iPhone, iPad

Published by GameTantra and distributed by Capcom Mobile.

Reached #43 on USA paid game charts.

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Questions?

rao@dhruva.com

krajeshrao

www.dhruva.com