Designing for the Untestable
Originally written for #AltDevBlog
Sometimes you’re asked to design for the untestable scenario. For instance, design a system for 10,000 players to asynchrously interact in a persistent competitive world with progression mechanics that plays out over 3 months.
Disclaimer: The entire time you are reading this remember one basic truth or else everything else contained herein is useless.
Focus on second-to-second play first. Nail it. Move on to minute-to-minute, then session-to-session, then day-to-day, then month-to-month (and so on). If your second-to-second play doesn’t work, nothing else matters. Along these lines, if your day-to-day fails, no one will care about month-to-month, either.
- Brenda Brathwaite
Project Humps
This LudumDare I was hit by a blaze of inspiration. I was soooo excited by this project!!! Then the truck of problems ran me over, several times.
Build a 3D Spatial Puzzle based on a secret phrase. The phrase is revealed when the person completes the puzzle.
Then I opened Unity3D and it constantly hit me with minor irritations, though to be fair I've gotten over most of those. The real stumbling block is lots and lots of obscure Math and Niggly technical problems.
Now an interesting problem is exciting and one which you can get your teeth into and gets you excited. One example of this is the generation of the spatial puzzle. Which is awesome procedural content generation.
No I'm talking about stupid little math problems, rotations, parenting and frankly silly stupid problems. Stuff which on paper is stupidly simple. Things like smoothing out camera behaviours, improving physics performances and glitches.
I think I can safely say 90% of the project has been hung up on technical glitches and minor issues. Not sure if I'm going to continue. Taking a breather and thinking about it again.
Prototype - Click to Try
WASD + QE = Camera Controls
Space = Break-up & Rotate Drag Piece
Left Mouse = Select Object
Right Mouse Drag = Drag Object Around
Crazy Weekend
Hi guys and girls, I'm crunching through my maths assignment and what not. I had a few spare hours today but I threw them at an incomplete entry into LD48. I know I know priorities.
Go check out the contest though over at wavelength.