Have Skills, Will Travel Charles Armour

Plaything to Product

Trivial is not the word that comes to mind when I consider my development and management skill sets.  I’ve successfully managed million dollar projects and developed software for huge clusters of machines, so the progression on iLostMyMarbles has come as a surprise.  I narrowed the problem down to my mindset, where I consider games trivial applications. Nothing is further from the truth, and game development is much, much less forgiving!

As much as I hate to admit it, this is a repeating trend for me, as the first time I go down a new avenue of programming I’m much more apt to throw something together than to take the time to plan everything out.  This is more or less how I learn, and has always served me well as those learning projects never get off my hard drive.  iLostMyMarbles is a different beast since I’ve allowed it to cross the threshold from plaything to product, and has reminded me in no uncertain terms that nothing should be developed without a solid architecture and at least some documentation.

This comes up because I’ve now been hacking (in the literary sense), rather than programming, more functionality into the game.  My original intent was to get familiar with game graphics on the iPhone, and now I’ve gotten myself into acceleration, databases, networking, and a whole host of performance tweaks.  I’ll end up spending at least as much time condensing and cleaning my code as writing it took, and that time will all be wasted for want of a properly conceived architecture.