Why do a rapid development ?

  • Speed - Improve your ability to perform tasks quickly, even under pressure.
  • Adaptation / Agility - Learn to hit a moving target and adapt to radical shifts in design and requirements.
  • Hindsight - Benefit from a high frequency of postmortems and a quick turnaround on action-verses-consequence lessons.
  • Fun - Have a good time. Laugh at yourself. After all, you’re really quite pathetic.
  • Balance - Learn to govern the balance between speed and quality, between risk and reward. Learn to avoid oversolving or undersolving problems.
  • Exposure - Be exposed to a wide variety of game development domains. Move through many different diverse problem spaces. Go from 3D modeling to 2D pixel-pushing, real-time to turn-based design, from A.I. to network code.
  • Experimentation - Dare to try stupid or silly ideas. They just might surprise you and turn out to be works of genius.
  • Proof of Concept - Prototype gameplay concepts for immediate fun-factor feedback. Stumble onto an idea that becomes the seed for a AAA title. A fun-to-play demo speaks louder than a boring-to-read design doc.
  • Cooperation - Improve your ability to work closely with other developers under the gun.
  • Communication - Learn how to communicate efficiently and succinctly. Learn when to talk and when to shut up. Learn when documentation is critical and when it isn’t.
  • Time Management - Hone your ability to estimate task completion time. Learn to work smart, even under extreme time pressure.
  • Community - Work with area game development peers. Build cross-company relationships.
  • Challenge - Set the bar high. Jump higher.
  • Restraint / Self-Discipline - Learn how not to bite off more than you can chew. Learn the fine art of culling the good ideas from the great ones, and cutting the great ones when they become infeasible.
  • Inspiration - Become inspired by an idea prototype, then go off later and explore that avenue further and in greater depth.
  • Creation - Force yourself to create. Get those “bad” ideas out. Give yourself the opportunity to create something great by allowing yourself permission to make something awful.