principles
Trying to build up some backbone - how do we find commonality across decision making? What values are more important than others? What has served me well, and what was useful at one point but has faded away somewhat since?
Play to your strengths
But what are my strengths?
> Microfiction
> Dev Environment
> Automation
Optimize for motivation and feedback
Share early and often to keep yourself going
Optimize for something
Feedback Loops
Set things up such that projects get feedback easily and often
Learning:
- from game players
- from story readers
- from consuming developers
Be authentic - make stuff 'true to us'
Pick your head up and Articulate the problem
"What problem does this tool solve?"
Aspire to Inspire
Give life to our creations
"What is this character's belief?"
"What effect does this env/setting have on this character's behavior?"
The Dev-Loop's speed is exponential
establish an efficient dev loop early
keep it sharp the whole time
Dev environment/writing environment requires feedback
Keep the knives sharp
"how is this being consumed?"
live-reload, simple state replay
Capture Targets and Structured Input
Capture is a mix of structured and unstructured moments a capture target: answer to 'what am i capturing?' ex: idea, todo, story prompt, pixel prompt, game mechanic, etc. 'what bucket does this fall into?' principle? new ip? ex: review or planning thought?
Non-interrupting capture flow
Visualization/Creating feeds the hammock, improves the mental model
creating visualizations by hand - being creative with content helps you really
learn it
making something with content/data _by hand_ improves understanding
Feed the Hammock
get the important things in memory
Self-expression in all things
"am i expressing myself?"
"what am i expressing?"
Discovery
How do you learn that a thing exists? ... of a function, namespace, tool, a feature partially workflow, partially good docs go to definition, alfred + dash surface area at-a-glance process for learning a new thing? what tools help people with discovery?
- Discovery is super important
- needs to be super easy to learn an api's surface area
- tools that have helped:
- alfred + dash
- company mode
- describe namespace
- go to definition
- ivy-cider
People in Communities perform better than in isolation
people in communities:
- learn faster
- solve problems faster
- come to better solutions
I used to think it was experience, but it's about building the right community
It's not you, it's your community
Community quality: Dialectic
Community quality: Listening
Planning is Worth Practicing
Less of High Quality > More of Low Quality
benjamin's: architecture/growth debt vs tech/quality debt
justin's: Balmer vs Jobs product approach
dao's: product design as following user-input or an internal visionary where does the vision come from?
Integrate Early (first) (immediately)
Incremental Improvements > Sweeping Rewrites
what's the process for moving a codebase in the right direction?
Gut Instincts should be unpacked and explicitly explored
Engineering as Pushing the Top Line Up
Opportunities > Fixing Problems/Running efficiently
From a 1 on 1 with Justin
Building Keybindings for apps
more than just a bunch of buttons, a whole control panel
processes should be explicit
- idea -> comic
- idea -> character in a game
- idea -> level in a game
- idea -> whole game
What do i expect the path and necessary assets to be? ...for a game? ...for a repo/app?
Iteration (simple porcesses)
Doing a process over and over reduces its overhead
A good iteration:
- is a simple processes
- has clear input
- has clear output
- execution is easy and obvious
- has a planning period informed by previous review periods make explicit expected details during execution
- has a review period for listening informed by notes from execution time for capturing adjustments benefited by visualizations
Explicit
Review is for listening, visualizing, adjusting
Step back
visualize the information
listen without preconceptions
dig for root problems (5 whys)
record explicit feedback + learnings
record explicit adjustments to the process
Review vs planning
> review
'retro'
step back, listen
look backwards
compare to others
capture process _adjustments_, misc feedback
> plan
'scoping'
look forwards
project, predict
adjust scope
Visualize Early and Often
Record explicit lessons and takeaways
Plan before execution
Minimize! Simplify!
Prioritize! Focus!
pull from photos of my old bedroom wall doodle sayings
It will be essential to be ourselves when we make this thing, and everything
It will be essential to be ourselves when we make this thing, and everything
https://open.spotify.com/track/7zEZT7jBecQ2B4IQKHBiLn?si=EWpV9-ufRKCrd4G5BWYHJQ
Who is who is who is youuuuuu
Who is who is who is meeeeee
Get that Ted lasso girl talk
Just jibber jabbering
Backlinks
Inspired by NaNoWriMo's "magna carta"s, this is a list of things in games that I've liked.
They are here as inspiration, motivation, and as a tribute. I hope to borrow/steal/remix/create with this, to give my own games a bit of the joy these brought me.
These should help step towards the principles I care about in games. What themes are threaded through all these?
See also: