Project failure

For motivation and future reference I will be documenting my thoughts about a current personal project.
The goal of this project is to push me to experiment and fail, so I can learn faster and widen my way of thinking.

Description

The project itself is experimenting with a different workflow of making a game. Going off the road of unwritten rules and trying to fail as fast as possible to find a workflow that makes me and my co developers more happy. I want to find proof that making the pipeline more exciting and enjoyable, gives you a better end result.

The key aspects that I want to research are :

- Transparency = Make all the building blocks visible for everybody. Show them all the possible problems and what is still unclear. What mistakes we need to make to get a result and possible ways of tackling these problems.The big challenge here will be the how to add good usability to bring this transparency to the user.

A good example is a kid who is throwing all his Lego blocks wide spread all over the floor to have an overview of what he can use, so he can be creative with the tools he got.

- Asking the right questions : As there are a lot of pitfalls in a workflow, motivating people to ask the right questions to find these pitfalls will be an other challenge. Too much people are waiting for answers without asking the right question. So finding a way to teach the behaviour to look for good questions could be a very nice experiment.

- K.I.S.S = Keep it simple stupid . If we can not explain it easily to someone with different interests, we are doing something wrong. Very important to keep in mind. Forces people to look into the matter from a different perspective if the target person is not well know with the general terms.

This is also a project in our free time. If we make it too complex, it could be easy to loose motivation.

- Iteration : Making tools that allows to easily iterating key for failing fast. Usability, simplicity and efficiency. (And making sure if we really need the tool ... ) All these tools should be designed without a specific discipline in mind.

It is possible new aspects will be added later, but this a good start.

The end result of the project should be a demo game that teaches the player how to make use of his fear of failure. As games consist of constant failure, this is the perfect medium to set up unnecessary obstacles to make the user aware of how to use his fear of failure to becomes stronger as a person.

The team on this project will consist out of a technical artist, level designer, animator, graphical designer and psychologist. There are no constrains on tasks and freedom to experiment is the key goal.

Let the failure begin!