Why I’m building this
I run our company’s annual and quarterly planning meetings. Several years ago, I turned Annual Planning into a makeshift board game using whiteboards and productivity tools. Engagement stayed high through a long meeting, the team enjoyed it, and we came away with useful goals and plans.
I’ve wanted to revisit the idea ever since. Now I can actually build games.
Over approximately 13 weeks, I’m building a local multiplayer video game for our next Annual Planning meeting and documenting what I learn. The structure takes inspiration from party and board games, but the test happens in a real meeting.
The experiment
The goal goes beyond making a meeting entertaining. I want to find out whether game mechanics can help people understand goals and metrics, join strategic discussions, remember decisions, and work together through a long planning session.
That’s a question to test, not a result I can claim yet.
Current scope
MVP 1.0 is intentionally narrow: one company, one Annual Planning meeting, local multiplayer, and simple controller and keyboard input.
- A board/party-game-inspired structure.
- Planning activities and minigames built around specific business concepts.
- Company goals and metrics where appropriate inside the private meeting.
- Meeting/session state, player progression, and scoring where they support the experience.
- Results and feedback collection to evaluate what actually worked.
These are the prototype’s design scope, rather than a claim that every system is already finished. It is an internal experiment, not a public commercial product, and there is no promised public release.
What I’ll share
I plan to document game design, development decisions, mechanics, systems, mistakes, and lessons alongside my existing game-development writing. Public examples will be generalized; any results shared will be anonymized where appropriate. Private company information stays private.
What happens next
After Annual Planning, I’ll evaluate whether the game improved the meeting, what players thought of the game itself, which mechanics worked, and what failed. I also want to understand whether persistent progression into future quarterly meetings would be useful.
If the experiment works, I may build a second version for the following quarterly planning meeting. Anything beyond that remains exploratory.
What about DOOM DELIVERY?
DOOM DELIVERY 1.0 is still a project I care about and intend to continue. I’ve temporarily paused full production because this experiment has a fixed real-world testing window that only comes around once a year. Once the experiment is complete, I’ll decide the next development schedule based on what I learn.