One interesting aspect of having an attention span of a few seconds is that you just need to start doing things. Like, right now. When Lena Thorsmæhlum and I came up with the idea to build an interactive story engine, we had the first proof-of-concept ready within 24 hours. And by that, I mean a short but playable story and a completely dynamic rogue-like game. I knew that if I couldnt see results immediately, I would lose interest. I cant concentrate. So sue me. Since then, weve just been building and testing and finding neat things to do so its easier for both authors and players to get what they want. Of course, you dont really have much time to research what was already out there when you just start. Youd think that would be a major disadvantage, but frankly, in our case, its a great thing. You see, weve not tried to beat any competition. In fact, weve just tried building something that we think will be great. That means we have used modern techniques and approaches (HTML+JS, Agile, MVC/MVVM, etc). It turns out, however, that our competition is decades behind. Literally. Most of the stuff thats already out there starts out by saying this is going to be easy, its just like programming C! which, frankly, freaks out even me, and Ive written C for a decade. So, when we started looking around, we saw that the stuff out there is far behind our approach. In fact, from the initial testers, we get comments like Wow, the UI is so great when in reality, the UI is the thing weve spent the least time building. Its a default template that comes with the VS 2013 project, for crying out loud. We can deliver new versions of our entire platform every week (although this weekend I was lazy) when our competition in some cases havent updated their platforms since 2006. We can ask the community What do you think? and have suggestions implemented in days rather than months or even years. Im optimistic, despite realizing theres far more competition out there than we knew. Thats fine, Ive built a name from nothing in highly competitive industries before and I have no problem doing it again.
Posted on: Mon, 13 Oct 2014 06:16:53 +0000