Lost Garden

Boys and girls, I present my first game, Rocket Renegade.

"Don't you want a little taste of the glory, see what it tastes like?" [1]

I rocked all of the code and the music [2], so you can run and tell that.

The sprite-based graphics appear courtesy of Daniel Cook [3]. Thank you, Daniel, for the graphics that you lovingly created nearly 20 years ago on the Amiga 1200. I hope that my game makes you feel proud and nostalgic.

Thank you, John Dunbar [4]. John created Plasma Sky. He was kind enough to answer a number of development-related questions that I had. I'll add that you really need Plasma Sky in your line-up if you love you some shmups.

I wanted to talk about a feeling I've been experiencing. I think that you may be able to relate, but the most notable experience that I had during development was working to get comfortable with hardcore, radical, relentless persistence. What I mean here is, I worked incredibly hard to make this game a reality. I hit many roadblocks with Swift in the early betas, and it was tough. Near launch, I hit a bug where things ran flawlessly on hardware, but would have a yard-sale on some, but not all, simulators. Beyond a single hardware unit, I had to rely on simulators due to budget constraints. I've logged millions of points playing this game so that it could be the very best that I could deliver. Millions of points. I've broken down in tears, for a complex reason that's hard to explain, but I'll try, because I feel like it's important to…

Resources which helped me get started:

"Challenges for Games Designers" by Brathwaite & Schreiber. This was by far the most helpful, as it laid out a process of finding & refining fun game ideas.

"Game Feel" by Swink. Examines why jumping feels better in Super Mario than Donkey Kong, why Street Fighter feels the way it does, etc. This way of breaking down & examining mechanics was eye opening and can be applied to other kinds of games.

lostgarden.com, especially https://lostgarden.com/2008/12/06/post-it-note-design-docs/, which describes a process for rapidly iterating on ideas, and https://lostgarden.com/2006/10/24/what-are-game-mechanics/, which introduced me to some of the fundamental building blocks of game mechanics.

Resources which helped me later:

I found "Art of Game Design" to be helpful later, when working on making a good game into a great game. The different lenses were great for finding areas where I could improve a game.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Fy0aCDmgnxg really drove home how important polish is. This was useful after I had a game which was already a bit fun.

Finally, an observation & a suggestion, if you're open to them: You admit that you don't know game design, yet you're attempting to innovate by removing limits. This seems like an enormous challenge for a beginner, like someone who doesn't know how to play an instrument attempting to make a new style of jazz.

I think you'd have more success if you learned to play the instrument first:…

"At the end of a YC batch, the general consensus among the partners is that about 25% of the companies are on a trajectory that could lead to a multi-billion dollar company. Of course, only a handful of them do. Most go on to be decent or bad."

"You have to keep up a high level of intensity for many, many years."

Don't take this the wrong way /u/sama, but could it be that perhaps business models are the problem and not founders not grinding away for years on "real work"? 90% of startups fail [1] [2]. I am highly suspect of the idea that this is caused by teams not being committed or working on "fake work". More likely, markets shift, business models aren't viable, and so forth. This is not a case of people "not giving it their all".

[1] http://www.quora.com/What-percentage-of-startups-fail?share=1

[2] http://www.forbes.com/sites/neilpatel/2015/01/16/90-of-startups-will-fail-heres-what-you-need-to-know-about-the-10/

EDIT: Its been proven scientifically that people encounter diminising returns past 40-50 hour work weeks. [3] Don't encourage grinding harder. Encourage finding where to exert the most leverage, and hiring best people you can hire today. Quality people + automation leverage (your software) + quality marketing is a solid formula (but not a guarantee) for success. Luck, while no one wants to admit it, is a non-insignificant component of success ("right place at the right time").

[3] http://www.lostgarden.com/2008/09/rules-of-productivity-presentation.html

It has been studied (first in 1909 by Henry Ford!). As I understand it the results agree with the original post.

In short, you can use crunch time strategically to meet deadlines but you always need a recovery period afterwards. If you work 60 hour weeks, in about 4 weeks your productivity will drop lower than it was when you were working 40 hour weeks - despite putting in 50% more hours. Also many people in this burnout zone will self report that their productivity is higher than it was (and they're wrong). If you've been crunching for a month straight, you're working ineffectively and you're too tired to tell.

Here's a presentation on the topic from Dan Cook, with links to papers:
http://lostgarden.com/Rules%20of%20Productivity.pdf

And here's a fantastic write-up of a recent quantitative study in the games industry. They looked at how the success of video games correlates with crunch time and overwork. I suspect that these results would also hold true amongst startups:
http://www.gamasutra.com/blogs/PaulTozour/20150120/234443/The_Game_Outcomes_Project_Part_4_Crunch_Makes_Games_Worse.php

I don't get this. On the one hand there's the 40h-a-week camp, backed up by plenty of research [1] and on the other hand there's the work-as-much-as-you-possibly-can camp, which seems to be what plenty of successful startup have been following. So what's the deal? Why this discrepancy?
It's not about manual vs knowledge working - studies on knowledge workers show that even less than 40h / week is beneficial. Is it about the difference in possible leverage? Self-directed work? The close link between work and payoff? The stressful situation in a startup? The 100% commitment?

Any attempts to pin down why and under what circumstances [2] different work hour guidelines should apply would be greatly appreciated.

1: See studies in this pdf http://www.lostgarden.com/2008/09/rules-of-productivity-presentation.html

2: What's the difference between starting your own company, running your own company, joining a startup, doing a PhD, being in a research team, working at an established startup?

I would be amazed if it were sustainable for even that long. My recollection is that it's a couple of weeks before productivity ends up back where it would be if you were just working reasonable hours. And then you rapidly descend into less and less productive states. (There used to be a great presentation with linked research about this here [1], but their website seems shaky.)

I think it's an especially bad idea at high levels of the company, because of the long feedback loops. If a line worker makes a mistake, they will hopefully catch that within hours. If they make a bunch, somebody's going to come talk to them in short order. If an executive makes a mistake, it can be months or years before the problem is obvious. But the more tired I am, the more my focus shifts short-term and the less I notice subtleties and small mistakes. increased error rates and long feedback loops are a very bad combination.

[1] http://www.lostgarden.com/2008/09/rules-of-productivity-presentation.html