Fail fast, Fail better
|
I am currently studying Game Design and Programming at Uppsala University, two weeks in to it, with the intention to be a game designer. Like many others I have hopes and dreams and would of course like to say that I am going to be the best designer that there ever will be. But I know that to get to that point I am going to have to learn a lot. One of my lecturers has said that we are going to make mistakes and that we need to learn from them. “Fail fast, fail better”. If we get to far into a project without testing and realise that something doesn’t work, we have wasted a ton of time and might have to restart, and that could be avoided by constant testing of everything that is added/removed/changed. By testing and seeing what works and what doesn’t earlier, we can course correct without much loss. We recently had an assignment that involved altering the game SiSSyFiGHT by changing the setting from a game about bullying in a schoolyard, and changing the mechanics of the game to reflect the new setting, without changing the core of the game. This involved testing the game over and over again, and if we only had tested the game after all the changes instead of during, I do not believe that the assignment would have been successful. By failing faster we could see the flaws that were present at the time and by failing better we knew what had to be changed. “Fail fast, fail better”. I have never blogged before, and I would like to believe that it is something that can simply be picked up by anyone and done easily. But just by writing this post I have realised that practice is needed like so many other things. “Fail fast, fail better” is a term that not only applies to game design, but to almost anything. By writing this post I have seen that I need to fail faster and fail better when it comes to writing, and I going to apply that to other aspects of my life as well, in order to grow as a person. “Fail fast, fail better”.  |
