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The Number One Educational Resource for the Game Industry

Session Name: Better Development Through Science: How Aliens, Odysseus, and Toyota Can Help Improve Production
Speaker(s): Justin Fischer
Company Name(s): Agency Principle, LLC
Track / Format: Production & Team Management

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Overview: Game development is an exercise in quasi-controlled chaos. But what if you could make sense of the madness? The same tools Fortune 500 companies use to manage billion-dollar supply chains and e-commerce portals can work for game development. You don't need expensive analytics packages or reams of data. You just need Excel, arithmetic, and an understanding of your current processes. The session starts with the fundamental principle of operations, Little's Law, and how you can use it to analyze any pipeline process. From there, Justin will show you how to leverage that basic concept and a simple spreadsheet to optimally staff those processes. The second half will be a deep dive into lean production, using the famous Toyota production system as a template. Justin will show you how to systematically minimize wasted effort and maximize your ability to respond to change with practical, concrete examples. Welcome to game development...with science!

GDC 2017

Justin Fischer

Agency Principle, LLC

free content

Production & Team Management

Production