Skip to main content

Incremental Development

So my recent exploration of tackling my personal game projects in a different way has been paying off massive ways.  I have been far more productive and creative.  With that comes excitement for the project and even more excitement to show people the game because it is a constant state of completion.  I was digging around the internet more and watching programming talks and reading papers on software creation when I came across one that I had heard about but never read.  It is a paper called "No Silver Bullet" by Fred Brooks.  It is a wonder paper and I was super excited when I came across this section towards the end because it turns out it is exactly the approach I have been taking and I have been experiencing the same results from a personal and production level.

Incremental development--grow, don't build, software. I still remember the jolt I felt in 1958 when I first heard a friend talk about building a program, as opposed to writing one. In a flash he broadened my whole view of the software process. The metaphor shift was powerful, and accurate. Today we understand how like other building processes the construction of software is, and we freely use other elements of the metaphor, such as specifications, assembly of components, and scaffolding.
The building metaphor has outlived its usefulness. It is time to change again. If, as I believe, the conceptual structures we construct today are too complicated to be specified accurately in advance, and too complex to be built faultlessly, then we must take a radically different approach.
Let us turn nature and study complexity in living things, instead of just the dead works of man. Here we find constructs whose complexities thrill us with awe. The brain alone is intricate beyond mapping, powerful beyond imitation, rich in diversity, self-protecting, and selfrenewing. The secret is that it is grown, not built.
So it must be with our software-systems. Some years ago Harlan Mills proposed that any software system should be grown by incremental development. [10] That is, the system should first be made to run, even if it does nothing useful except call the proper set of dummy subprograms. Then, bit by bit, it should be fleshed out, with the subprograms in turn being developed--into actions or calls to empty stubs in the level below.
I have seen most dramatic results since I began urging this technique on the project builders in my Software Engineering Laboratory class. Nothing in the past decade has so radically changed my own practice, or its effectiveness. The approach necessitates top-down design, for it is a top-down growing of the software. It allows easy backtracking. It lends itself to early prototypes. Each added function and new provision for more complex data or circumstances grows organically out of what is already there.
The morale effects are startling. Enthusiasm jumps when there is a running system, even a simple one. Efforts redouble when the first picture from a new graphics software system appears on the screen, even if it is only a rectangle. One always has, at every stage in the process, a working system. I find that teams can grow much more complex entities in four months than they can build.
The same benefits can be realized on large projects as on my small ones. [11]

I found this piece of the paper to really jump out for me, but I think that is because it most closley matches my mental thinking lately.  However there are absolute gems in the entire paper so treat yoru self and give it a good read, and then another read and another.  My hope is that it might kick start something exciting for your own work too!
Labels:

Comments

Post a Comment

Popular posts from this blog

Level Buddy | Blender Addon

An old-school CSG inspired level editor add-on for Blender 3D. The add-on is still very much a work in progress but fairly solid for blocking spaces super quickly.  Just because graphic fidelity has gotten insanely good and hyper detailed doesn't mean we shouldn't look back how older games were put together, at least that is my opinion.  One thing I always come back to is how quickly the tools in the first 2 versions of Unreal Ed 2 and Doom level editors allowed anyone to block out a level, iterate on feedback or try an idea out.  So I just took some time to put together a similar pipeline right in my 3d package of choice.  I wanted to keep it simple and quick to try out level design ideas.  You can use it for simple white boxing of your level, break it up into multiple static meshes and import them into your game engine of choice or  you can use that as your starting point to start more detailed modeling ....
Post a Comment
Read more

Mega Cow | Video Game Mockup

We All Have Crazy Game Ideas...This Is Just One Of My Own Yup its a giant mutant cow... Using Inkscape I made this game mockup after watching some MST3K late one night.  I thought it would be fun to play a game where you were the giant creature causing all of the destruction.  That is the reason the giant cow is on the right of the screen instead of the left. The player would move through the level from the right to the left, the opposite of pretty much every scrolling game... looks good in my head but might not work in actual game play.  Below are some images showing the progression from rough sketch to final mock-up.
Post a Comment
Read more

Rocky Terrain | Blender Internal Rendering

I saw a really awesome render of some rocks the other day and was inspired to see if I could recreate a version of my own of some rocky terrain so I made this little scene.  The scene was modled, rendered and composited in Blender 3D .  It is a very simple scene and made just for fun in a couple of hours.  The rocks are all subsurface cube objects that I run a noise displacement map on using the world coordinates.  This allowed me to just make instances of the cube and drag them around the scene to get different rock shapes.  Some of the rocks needed to be scaled to get some more size variation but that is pretty much the only thing that is different about them other then their positions.  It was actually really fun to just move the cube around the scene and watch these random rock shapes form.  After the layout was done I added in some particle grass to break the ground up.  Not enough time was spent on the grass so it looks pretty bad ...
Post a Comment
Read more