Start-And-Discard: A Unified Workflow for Development and Live - GDC 2020

Start-And-Discard: A Unified Workflow for Development and Live, with Björn Törnqvist from Massive Entertainment - A Ubisoft Studio.

Massive Entertainment is unifying the production and live aspects of games development by focusing on a single unified workflow called Start-and-Discard. This enables the product and the workflow to be iterated upon in tandem during production and after release. The Start-and-Discard workflow increases the quality-of-product by ensuring that every playtest is 100% relevant for the live game. Furthermore, it increases quality-of-life by ensuring that the live workflow of deploying, debugging, and monitoring is practiced and iterated upon at every single playtest. This talk covers the Start-and-Discard workflow in detail, as well as the logical implications of it for production, QC, and live.

Time Stamps:
00:00 – Intro
01:13 – Background
02:41 – What’s Cool About Our Online
03:59 – Consequences
09:28 – Testing
11:04 – A Changing Industry
12:06 – Breaking the Chain of Complexity
19:37 – Simulation
23:30 – Conclusion

[MercuryK]

Thank you for making your GDC talks available on youtube, very interesting!

[bilalakil]

Appreciate the talk - I find it very thought provoking!

I have a question about the on-demand nature of the cloud services you're using. I assume this simply means services/servers are being brought up on request, and then torn down once finished (start and discard basically), but I don't understand how this can result in "zero cost for most S+D environments".

Is this zero *additional* cost relative to if you had used in-house servers, or is there some other aspect of the on-demand nature of your stack that I'm not understanding?