Ten questions
An honest look at where your project actually is
These are close to the questions I ask in the first hour of a review. Tick the ones that are true. Nobody is watching—this runs entirely in your browser, nothing is transmitted, nothing is stored, and there's no email box at the end.
A note on the scoring, because it's not really about the number. Almost every studio ticks several of these, including successful teams. What matters is not how many are true but whether they're connected. Bad frame rate, a slipping date and a nervous publisher are frequently three views of one underlying problem, and the useful work is finding which one.
What I would say to each of them
“Frame rate is bad and nobody can explain why.”
This is often much more bounded than it feels. A first honest capture on real target hardware can usually separate CPU, GPU, waiting and hitching quickly, even when the eventual fix needs deeper work or a system specialist. Robert has written about the usual suspects.
“Builds take forever.”
Multiply the wasted minutes by the people affected and their daily cost. The result is often large enough to change where pipeline work sits in the plan—and it is a problem the team feels every day. Here's how to measure it.
“One person owns the critical system.”
Two risks, and the second is the one people miss. The obvious one is that they leave. The quieter one is that they can't take a holiday, can't be ill, and eventually resent it — which is how the obvious risk happens. The fix is rarely documentation; it's usually a second pair of hands in that code for a month.
“The publisher has gone quiet.”
Silence generally means something specific rather than nothing. Usually one identifiable thing failed to convince, and often it's not the thing you'd assume. What you send next matters more than how many times you chase.
“Less than nine months of runway.”
Then the most valuable thing anyone can do for you is help you decide what to cut, and help you say it to your team in a way that reads as a plan rather than a loss of faith. That conversation is worth having in month one of the nine, not month seven. Here's a week-by-week version.
Whatever you scored
Twenty minutes, free, no pitch. If the answer is that you're fine and should save your money, I will say so.