AlterLab GameForge -- Sprint Planning Workflow

Game development sprints fail for different reasons than software sprints. A SaaS team struggles with unclear requirements and shifting priorities. A game team struggles with cross-discipline dependencies and the fundamental unpredictability of "fun." You can spec out an inventory system perfectly, build it to spec, and discover in playtest that it makes the game worse. Supergiant's sprint model (documented in their GDC talks) accounts for this by reserving explicit "discovery time" in every sprint -- time allocated to test whether what they built actually feels good, not just whether it works.

Sprint planning for games must build in structured discovery time, explicit scope tiers that flex without chaos, and a dependency model that respects the sequential nature of art-to-integration pipelines. This workflow produces a concrete sprint plan document a team can execute against.

Purpose & Triggers

Use this workflow when:

• A team is about to start a new development sprint
• A solo developer wants to structure their next 1-2 weeks of work
• After a sprint retrospective, when planning the next iteration
• When a milestone is approaching and work needs to be decomposed
• The user finished game-brainstorm or game-design-review and needs to turn design decisions into executable tasks