Roadmaps That Don’t Lie

Planning for Gamedev Teams

By: Leszek Lisowski

Narrated by: Virtual Voice

Your roadmap says the project is on track. The build says otherwise.

Dates remain visible. Milestones stay in place. Teams keep working. Yet dependencies tighten, capacity disappears into integration and support, and every forecast becomes harder to defend. Eventually, the roadmap stops helping the team make decisions and starts functioning as a document everyone is expected to believe.

Roadmaps That Don’t Lie – Planning for Gamedev Teams is a practical guide to building production roadmaps that remain useful when game development stops following the original plan.

Written for producers, project leads, designers, engineers, artists, and QA leads working in indie and AA studios, this volume focuses on realistic planning under uncertainty. It shows how to connect product direction with production evidence, plan from actual capacity, structure milestones around proof, and update forecasts without creating panic or destroying trust.

Inside, you will learn how to:
• distinguish product roadmaps from production roadmaps and internal plans from external communication,
• build a rolling roadmap around real capacity, dependencies, constraints, and risk,
• replace feature lists with outcomes that can be verified in a playable build,
• define guardrails, trade-offs, non-goals, and decision options before pressure forces bad compromises,
• design milestones around proof, exit criteria, risks, owners, and reviewable artifacts,
• connect roadmap outcomes to milestone evidence and executable team tasks,
• reforecast, reorder, cut scope, or rebaseline the plan without turning every adjustment into a crisis,
• communicate dates through clear confidence language instead of accidental promises,
• separate external events and marketing commitments from console submission and certification timelines,
• and recognize when a roadmap has become too optimistic, too detailed, or too disconnected from production to remain useful.

The book includes practical templates for milestone cards, capacity snapshots, dependency reviews, roadmap updates, and rapid reforecasting. It also contains anonymized examples covering small teams, multi-discipline productions, live games, external deadlines, PC and console development, certification buffers, and platform risk.

This is not a book about predicting game development perfectly. That prediction does not exist.

It is a playbook for maintaining direction, making trade-offs visible, and keeping the plan credible as the project learns, changes, and encounters real production pressure.

Part of the Gamedev Playbook Series