As Gamescom starts up, the producer in me thinks about all the work that went into all those trailers and demos. And, how even the best planned milestones drift.
Everyone involved can feel it (Producers, Team, Partners, Stakeholders, probably some other group I'm forgetting). Despite all this, in most cases the drift is managed, but not well defined, tracked, or communicated…. All around, a situation I define as, "ungood".
It’s not just “Scope Creep”
What I've learned over the many (so many) years I've been doing this is that this drift is more than simple scope creep or a slip. Those are part of it, of course, along with the accretion-based shifts, emergent issues, development problems, and all the other issues we face in our day-to-day work.
So, more specifically, the drift is when we set a baseline for a milestone and plan to deliver A, B, and C. But by the time we deliver the milestone, we've done A, concepted B, realized we can't do C until we do D, which is now about halfway done, and we managed to get a jump on M, which is now nearly done.
I believe all this can be mitigated and managed, but I don't think it can be avoided. It's inherent to the creative work. There's simply so much we don't know when we start a milestone. The core issue is, regardless of the drift, there's still work to finish, gates to clear, and a ship date to hit.
The challenge is, while we can get a sense that drift is happening, and we can adjust our tasks and user stories (ideally sprint-by-sprint, but we know how it goes sometimes) to manage through it, but we often lose the big picture.
The Firehose
Even with good process and flow, there's just so much information coming in via slack, email, meeting notes, documentation, playtest feedback, telepathy, Morse code, singing telegrams, and a thousand other things that we can lose the thread. Leaving the team to try to reconstruct the changes, decisions, and shifts so that the next milestone can build on that to keep the project as a whole, headed in the right direction - towards the gates and ship.
You Can’t Just “Out Process” It.
In my experience, the fix isn't more process (believe me, I've tried). It's keeping a good record of what changed and (crucially) why it changed - kept up-to-date as those changes happen (or get discovered) so that there's clarity, good old-fashioned alignment, and a means to help keep the most critical aspects of a milestone on rails, so you can keep the game on track to actually ship.
Author note: I’ve spent my career leading and supporting cross-discipline creative teams, primarily in game development, with a focus on production clarity, alignment, and communication. I built DriftWarden for creative leaders who need to turn ambiguous direction into execution plans their teams can actually use. You can connect with me on LinkedIn.