rangerBlog - February 4th, 2007

03:45 am - [Ren'Py] Ren'py Game Development Project

An exercise in ADHD Game Design

In early February, I did some quick hack-work for a friend's website (php, database, templating system, internationalization) pulling together in about 12 hours over 2 days something a previous developer had spent 9 months on. He wrote beautiful scratchbuilt code. I hacked. (My version actually has two different templating systems, because it was faster to add a more robust Smarty install for what I wanted to do than to implement it in the templating system used by the rest of the site.)
My version got done- the other guy's didn't.

This all got me thinking about the virtues of speed in the development process.
A traditional development process emphasizes methodicalness. Pre-plan, sketch, make charts, organize all your stuff, then write, and when you're done writing, implement things.
I've got to be honest- real life never works that way. Every major commercial web-design content I've worked on begins with- "The client hasn't given us our content yet because he's late, but we have to begin implementing anyway." The result tends to be a combination between horribly frustrating and gleefully fun.
I used a similar process on a game prototype I worked on for a Biological Systems class last year- not by choice, but because my group was massively disorganized. The result was that I was taking the dialogue one of my other teammates had written and putting it into the game while the group before us was presenting, mating them with images I had made earlier… and had time to view it in action completely rewrite it to read better in context before it was time to present.
My platform of choice them was Ren'Py, a tool I chose because of its fast turnaround.

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