So after our initial great idea we need to try and specify exactly what it is we want to do. To do that involves asking people what they want this bit of software to do. Sounds simple? Far from it. While it can be easy to get a list of things people don’t like about an existing software program, getting a statement of what they actually do want is curiously hard. Fortunately there are many techniques (eg prototyping,use cases,scenarios) to try and help that process along. Another difficulty at this stage of development is finding the right people to ask! While senior managers may instigate the development, their specifications likely contradict those of day-to-day users. And then there is marketing’s view, health and safety, legal issues…. the list goes on. Just getting that lot to coherently talk together requires no small amount of diplomatic skills. At this stage a lot of information is being collected, requiring good filing skills. Recently I’ve used tools such as wikis and forums to encourage contributions and get them in an organised and documented form. One consequence of this process is that the developers learn about the area or “domain” involved. You don’t get the telecoms engineers learning to program, it’s the developer who has to learn about telecoms. Which means I’ve learnt in considerable depth about telephone exchanges, publishing and education to name just some domains. It certainly helps to assimilate information quickly!

Since this project has no customers, specifying it is a lot simpler. I’m christening it “Galactic”, not ‘cos it’s a great name but because it’s useful to have somewhere to file things! I’ll give more thought on a name as the game develops. Galactic is going to be in the 4x genre (explore, expand, exploit, and exterminate) The core of it is the space-based tactical battles where ships fight to gain control of planets. The unique(?) point is that ships will obey Newton’s laws, so no buzzing around like bees - a ship will continue on it’s path without engine thrust and can rotate to fire in one direction while travelling in another. The tactical battle is going to be more like a game of chess than a dogfight. Planets provide resources. Factories can be built to process those resources and eventually build more ships. Attached is some concept art hastely stapled together from internet bits - if this were a real project it would be a lot higher quality ‘cos it’s effectively the sales pitch. Till now you will have noticed, dear reader, that we haven’t done any supposed “techi” stuff. Thats going to change in the next post and if you’d like to follow along you might like to install a developers IDE to view the source code as it develops. I’ll be using Netbeans 6.9.1 but any modern IDE such as Eclipse should do fine. Tech-takeaway

Find a low effort way of recording who said what when. Avoid e-mail: its a bad way to have conversations. Pay as much attention to the people side as the technical.