Recently I worked on an exercice about timing, the global idea was simple :
« Take an existing game, make propositions to make it better. »
With only this sentence, I can already here the feature creep greedely crawling toward us, but, and here comes the subtelty of the exercice, those propositions should be as cost efficient as possible. And you have 48 hours.
Here, being cost efficient means that a feature should be balanced between quality and cost and difficulty of production. Meaning that even the best awesomest proposition wouldn’t be ideal because it would cost too much to do. In comparison, a simpler and cheaper feature, but bring enough quality is better.
This exercice is all being as accurate as possible in the estimation of the quality and difficulty. To do so, I created a google sheet a made a ranking with my proposition. The ranking being the ratio cost/quality. Using a sheet made it quite easy to sort all the proposition and make quick modification.
And if estimating the cost is quite difficult, it was a truly interesting exercice.
Nav's Workshop 