One More Game

One More Game's developers have worked on PC games, such as Warcraft, Diablo, StarCraft, and Guild Wars.

One More Game's CEO and founder, Patrick Wyatt, has stated that the company intends to adopt an Alpha-Driven Development (ADD) strategy. This strategy involves inviting a small number of players to test games early in development in order to gain their feedback while there is sufficient time to implement significant alterations to core game features.

According to Patrick Wyatt, the core tenets of ADD are the following:

• Begin testing early in development with a small group of external players, known as alpha testers, who are representative of the target audience for the game.
• Enable rapid developer iteration at the start of the project, allowing developers to deploy new, stable versions of the game to testers multiple times per day.

• Prioritize validating the game design over finding bugs during the alpha testing phase of the development process.

• Grant alpha testers access to the full experience without censoring potentially inauspicious features.

• Focus the developers' and testers' attention on gameplay over polish during the early development stages.

• In order to mitigate time and resource investment risks, developers should have an iterative approach to feature implementation and frequently deploy partial systems to testers to gain feedback, as opposed to constructing complete systems prior to testing.

• To avoid tester attrition, the development team must endeavor to build reliable systems and fix (non-cosmetic) bugs before building new features.

• Programmers are responsible for the code they develop and must fix bugs associated with their work before introducing new iterations of systems to increase reliability and reduce maintenance workload.

• Crunching is considered antithetical to success on the premise that overstrained developers work less effectively.
• Test features in a stable state and not added hastily, as this can create bugs that compromise the play session and lead to biased results.

According to Patrick Wyatt, the company's development goals consist of rapid iteration, frequent releases, and maintenance of a high level of service reliability.

One More Game uses prototyping to determine the feasibility of features; however, according to the company's development methodology, code that is released to players is held to a higher standard of quality. Preference is given to frequent, incremental releases of reliable code over feature-completeness.

In consideration of the conflict between scope (the size and complexity of a system) and reliability (how well code handles edge-cases and error conditions), One More Game opts to minimize scope in return for greater reliability. In addition, the company claims to prioritize bug-fixing before implementing new programming-based features.

With the introduction of new systems, One More Game estimates direct costs (development and operational expenses) and indirect costs (user attrition, customer support, future maintenance) to gain insight into the ensuing financial consequences, and performs research, design, prototyping, and peer review to alleviate these costs.

The company aims to minimize the use of threading and locks, reasoning that these software development processes can lead to service reliability issues. When operationalizing services, One More Games endeavors to automate runbooks, as, according to Patrick Wyatt, manual control increases the risk of outages. In general, the company aims to automate processes in cases where the cost of developing automation substantially diminishes ongoing costs or developer exertion.

In an interview with GamesBeat, Patrick Wyatt commented that the company will focus on developing open-ended online games as opposed to linear narrative-based single player games with finite content.