Follow the fun An Article by Dave Rupert daverupert.com Another great dissertation from Mark Brown of Game Maker’s Toolkit: The Games that Designed Themselves. It’s the radical idea that designers should ignore their preconceived notions and look to the game itself to find out where the development should lead. How does something design itself? Well… the answer is: Prototypes. A lot of great indie game masterpieces are the result of experimentation and early gameplay demos that changed the course of game’s development. As Brown points out, there’s a whole history of groundbreaking games that were developed “almost by accident” where bugs and glitches were turned into features. The game discovering itselfBuilding is never a straight lineGame feel gamesfun
Game feel An Article by Dave Rupert daverupert.com How do you make a game that’s fun? ...You have to focus on gameplay. In order for the final product to be fun and exciting, the core game play needs to be fun and exciting. The creator of Mario calls this 手応え (tegotae), which is often translated as “game feel”. To find this game feel, you need to build small prototypes around a single idea, play test them, and then follow the fun. Nintendo does this, indie game devs do this; this is the not-so-secret of the gaming industry. Follow the funFollow the brush prototypesmakinggames
Technical debt as a lack of understanding An Article by Dave Rupert daverupert.com "If you develop a program for a long period of time by only adding features but never reorganizing it to reflect your understanding of those features, then eventually that program simply does not contain any understanding and all efforts to work on it take longer and longer.” — Ward Cunningham softwareprocesscode
The Web is Industrialized and I Helped Industrialize It An Article by Dave Rupert daverupert.com In our cultural obsession with billionaire entrepreneurs we laud new features more than the maintenance and incrementalism work of making old features better and more accessible. Maintenance looks like red minus signs in the spreadsheet. New features look like green plus signs. New features look better on our LinkedIn profiles. New features have that pizzazz, baby. When gardening, the building of planters and initial planting is a very short process. The majority of your time is spent nurturing and monitoring growth. I personally feel the struggle between maintainer work and new shiny feature work. I enjoy that new feature smell but I know that my day-to-day is more like a janitor on a boat mopping up someone else’s barf. In terms of metaphors, the gardening metaphor is certainly better, and it acknowledges that design and development still tend to be more creative endeavors. featuresnoveltywww
The Fidelity Curve An Article by Ryan Singer m.signalvnoise.com How do we choose which level of fidelity is appropriate for a project? I think about it like this: The purpose of making sketches and mockups before coding is to gain confidence in what we plan to do. I’m trying to remove risk from the decision to build something by somehow “previewing” it in a cheaper form. There’s a trade-off here. The higher the fidelity of the mockup, the more confidence it gives me. But the longer it takes to create that mockup, the more time I’ve wasted on an intermediate step before building the real thing. I like to look at that trade-off economically. Each method reduces risk by letting me preview the outcome at lower fidelity, at the cost of time spent on it. The cost/benefit of each type of mockup is going to vary depending on the fidelity of the simulation and the work involved in building the real thing. Four levels of fidelityTime to build versus confidence gained prototypesinterfaces
Four levels of fidelity Suppose we have four levels of fidelity… Rough sketch (on paper or an iPad) Static mock-up (eg. Photoshop or Sketch) Interactive mock-up (eg. Framer, InVision) Working code prototype (HTML/CSS, iOS views) Depending on the feature you’re working on, these levels of fidelity take different amounts of time to create. If you plot them in terms of time to build versus confidence gained, you could imagine something like a per-feature fidelity curve.
Time to build versus confidence gained Show image 0 Show image 1 Show image 2 Take a simple CRUD web UI, where you’re just navigating between screens. It doesn’t take much more time to build the real version than it does to mock it when the design is simple. If you were to build out an interactive mock first, you would end up spending twice as much time in total without gaining much out of it. Contrast that with a complicated Javascript interaction. Or a native iOS feature that requires programmer time to build out. If it takes substantially more time to build the real code version, then it may be smart to do an interactive mockup first.