Mentally Outsourced Murphyjitsu.
I’ve recently been reading the CFAR handbook and after the Murphyjitsu chapter I realized that I use a similar technique that starts from a similar but I haven’t seen mentioned.
When thinking about a problem or a project, Murphyjitsu calls to think of a future that went wrong and asking oneself “what went wrong?” to come up with possible paths to tackle that you might be glossing over in your thought process due to different biases or cached answers. What I usually do is, instead, make up a fictional critic; it can be a smug smart-ass, a user for your app, or anything that ideally doesn’t see the world the way you do, so that their viewpoints and interest sometimes clash with yours.
Often, the most useful thing that this character says is some variation of “Why didn’t you just do this [thing]?”. Surprisingly, it doesn’t bump into the usual problems when someone external to a project asks that sort of question of beating on the same topics that have been thought through and already decided on, consuming valuable work time. This is, I guess, possibly due to the critic being privy to your own thoughts and knowing what’s useful to question or not.
I regularly apply this technique at certain intervals while working on a project, usually before deciding on what to work on or when thinking on what I could improve. I’ve personally found that it really helps me to notice possible issues before they arise, usually problems that originate even as far back as the planning phase, possibly due to not wanting to do the work that taking a certain path would entail, time or resource limitations at the moment of planning, or even things that I hadn’t thought of before (for example, use cases or wants from a certain kind of user that design didn’t take into account)
P.S. Taking opinions on possible names for this technique if it’s worthy of one; I hadn’t verbalized it before and didn’t know what to name it.
Yes! I’ve made short story games (for game jams and the like), silly experiments, and a game that actually got “on the algorithm”.
Anyone who has played Roblox on PC already has the editor installed (called Roblox Studio), it’s always come bundled with the normal executable. If you’re familiar with other game engines (Unity, Unreal, Godot) you’ll feel at home and if not, if you already know how to code Luau is pretty easy to get into.
Publishing experiences has some hurdles that didn’t use to exist (you have to be +17 or ID verify, I believe? The changes didn’t specifically affect me as I already had all of that) because there’s been a certain political pressure put on the platform and they’ve tightened up prerequisites to get your games to the public