Tiger Sheep

In light of Nathan’s opus, I will keep my entry short, on the importance of writing down what you are actually doing. Earlier this week we were discussing as a team how we were managing some graphical elements and the gut response from development was that we needed to structure things in a specific fashion to not break our current logic. Ultimately this was accepted, and everyone is just working around this limitation in our design.
 
Now to be clear, I am not advocating a no-limits mentality where you bend to every idea of any particular department. Limits on design and function are incredibly important and should be adhered to once decided upon. These limits however should be for good and communicable reasons that are backed up by a solid foundation, for example. To implement that feature as you have described it will take three to four days of design and another week of testing and rework to implement. This brings me back to the idea of writing down what you are doing. During our blogging session Nathan was writing about the techniques and design techniques used within Deceit and while writing his blog realized that his initial assumptions were flawed and what the art department was asking for would indeed be possible with only some very minor adjustments. If we didn’t do our weekly blog our final product would have been less interesting than it is now, and will be simply because we would have limited ourselves with no solid reason to back it up. This leads me to the conclusion that writing out your thoughts can definitely help bring a problem and the possible solutions into a greater degree of clarity.