Acorn Heroes

A craftsman's tool

I’ve spent a large chunk of today splitting wood to stack away for winter fires.  This may seem like a simple, manual process, but when you see what an experienced person can do with an axe, you quickly begin to appreciate the skill involved.  

Now I’m no expert, but I can appreciate the art of picking the right place to attack with the axe.  Get it wrong, and you feel impotent as the axe bounces off the log a if it was made of rubber.  Get it right, and you feel like a God among men.  Or something.

In the previous post I mentioned that to make progress on our iPhone projects in spare time between day jobs and families, we need to work smarter, not harder.  It’s much like splitting wood.  Picking what and where to attack are vital skills to possess.

Don’t bite off more than you can chew.  I don’t think there’s a developer alive who doesn’t have dreams of crafting the ultimate RPG, the perfect 4X game or recreate Elite on modern hardware with an infinite universe of unbounded opportunity.  But there’s a reason that these games have huge budgets and large teams working on them.  To be effective as a one or two man team, you need to pick your project’s wisely – aim for something achievable or you risk giving up in despair.  This needn’t be a limitation, it’s a chance to think outside the box.

Be ruthless, trim away the fat.  Keep the feature list tight.  This doesn’t mean selling your game short.  It means picking a reasonable feature set that you can polish to a high level, rather than doing twice as many things to a rough and buggy level.  Some of the best games have been built on this principle.  Take Diablo for example.  You can write the details of the gameplay on half a sheet of paper.  Tetris.  Could it be any simpler?  Never confuse simple with bad.

Get out of your ivory tower.  The only way to truly know the worth of your idea is to put it in front of genuine users.  Do it as soon as you can.  And do it often.  A few moments with a friend over coffee might save you trying out a bad idea.  As a developer it’s easy to get tunnel vision, and not see the bigger picture.  Let a fresh pair of eyes, and a potential user of your software give you insight into the good and the bad of your project.

Min / Max.  It may seem mercenary, and uncreative, but pick the simplest things that add maximum value to the project.  Sure, you can add that really hard to implement feature if you need to, but make sure it’s worth it.  Is it a unique selling point?  Something that no one else has done?  If not, is it worth the effort?

Lists. Whether it’s a project plan, or a to do list for the day.  Keep lists, they’re perhaps the single best way to stay focused.  And that’s ultimately the most important thing.

A sharp axe is good, but putting it in the right place is the real craft.

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