Today I watched Julie and Julia (or vice-versa) and I couldn’t help but get sympathetic to a feel-good movie about the ups, downs and hazards of a wacky personal project. That appropriately reminded me too, that I seemingly never set a hard deadline on my game project. As Brookes quoted:

Good cooking takes time. If you are made to wait, it is to serve you better, and to please you. [The Mythical Man Month p. 13 - originally: Menu of Restaurant Antoine, New Orleans.]

I won’t get into explaining how you cook-up a 12 hours pork stew, or why giving estimates for product delivery is pure technical arrogance facing money-wise operational goals. I’ve been dragging along (not always speed-jetting) carrying a mix of anxiety and anticipation, while clinging to ‘deliver often, deliver early’ as a mantra better than worth repeating every day.

‘Deliver often, deliver early’ could only mean either of two things in my case:

• Make a small product ‘just for the sake of it’.
  I clearly missed several opportunities in this area; in part because I’d done two small prototypes (A flash-card thing for chinese and a nicely animated icon matching game) and couldn’t see how this could either make money or, more importantly, drive the development of something more ambitious); in part because instead of starting making/learning/porting a 3D engine (a concrete, pragmatic move towards making a game), I wrote an (optional) behavior scripting system that merely implied the many components needed in a finished product.
• Define a ‘minimally marketable’ design for my product, and stick to it.
  On this side I’ve been more constant. While there’s a couple of non essential features that won’t make their way into the first release, I clearly anticipated early on what I needed to make my game usable, and keep it ‘minimally fun’.

Unsurprisingly, I didn’t start getting any good feedback from my casual play testers until I managed to tick all the boxes off ‘minimally playable and fun’. And now I do. I hear that my game is… …playable and fun.

OK, I lied. What it feels more like is, I’ve been working on this huge pile of cool stuff, until the day I patched it all together, only to realize it was neither playable, nor fun. I could have released a fun, playable game maybe 3 months ago. What’s true, however, is that that game wouldn’t have been as good as my prototype is now, because most of the cool stuff is making its way into the final product.

For the record, here’s a few things that aren’t needed to make a fun, playable 3D game, but still nice to have. In other words, the things that you might leave out if you need to release and make money ASAP:

• Support for exporting animations (you could make a space shooter instead, or whatever…).
• Procedural grass.
• Lighting (ever played Katamari on your iTouch?)
• Behavior scripting
• Cool camera management
• Modeling (or procedurally generating) natural landscapes
• …

‘By the way, maybe you should check what seems like an interesting article temptatively rooting Agile into Brookes’ book.

One more thing. Coding is nothing like cooking. Cooking may take 6 hours. Cooking may take a day. But cooking’s just cooking. Coding up stuff takes ages.

Plus, cooking is a healthy activity where you get to stand, scurry and scour the local markets for fresh veg, meat and fish. My back is half-killing me.