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Join me on a journey exploring the ups and downs of being a creator. I make things across many mediums including apps, games, and podcasts. Along the way, I take the side roads to motivation and inspiration. Navigating the winding paths that try to stop us from achieving our dreams and goals.
What's up, everybody? Welcome to another episode of the p w podcast. I'm your host as always, Peter Witham. You can find me and this podcast at peterwitham.com. This one, I'm gonna get back to the basics a little bit here.
Speaker 1:This is something that may not be obvious to many folks, especially if you're new to the field of say app and game creation. And that is to start really simple when it comes to the elements that you put on the screen. Now, why am I saying that? Clearly, I don't intend you to ship that, but if you do that, it will enable you to focus on features and workflows, all of the things that you need to get in place early to really get a feel for whether an app or a game is going in the right direction, or indeed whether it's worth doing at all. Let me explain a little bit.
Speaker 1:I was doing a livestream last night that reminded me of this. You can find my livestreams at twitch.tv/compiledev, one word. And I was working on one of my games. The game up until now had been squarely focused on building the core engine, the core idea, the main features, just the way that the game's gonna go, which meant there was not a lot of impressive graphics on the screen. Arguably, you could say there still isn't.
Speaker 1:It depends how you wanna look at it. But the point here is I put just enough on the screen, very basic shapes. Right? Cubes and circles and whatever it may be. If this was a UI for an app, it would just be squares for buttons or things like that.
Speaker 1:Just enough to get a feel for how the app or the game was gonna flow and how it feels to play a game, how things interact, the placement of things, stuff like that. Right? You do not need high fidelity interfaces or graphics or three d models or fancy effects for any of that. All you need is just enough to convey this is what it's gonna do. Right?
Speaker 1:So in this game, for example, I have a UFO that flies around. You can abduct cows. It's roguelike game, and that's pretty much the premise of the game. Right? Now in order for me to build some core features around that and experiment with ideas, all I needed was something on the screen to represent, number one, the ground, number two, a cow, which was just a basic cube, and number three, the UFO, which was just basically a very simple shape that I threw together in Blender.
Speaker 1:It was a squashed circle. That was it. That is all I needed to be able to explore this idea of how does it feel to play a game with the ideas of picking up these cows in the UFO. I didn't need fancy graphics or show them on the stream or anything like that. This was just how does it feel?
Speaker 1:Is it worth pursuing? Should I change the idea? That is all I needed. If I was doing an app, I would do the same thing. Right?
Speaker 1:I'm gonna have a button. I'm not gonna make it fancy. I don't care what the color is. That button is supposed to represent is good enough. And then some very basic layout for whatever else is on there.
Speaker 1:If it's a list, it's going to be the text in a list or whatever the content is. Very simple. So I can feel how the app is to use it, navigation between screens, have I got the right things on the screen, Should I adjust them? All of those kind of things. Then once I've got that in place, I start to build out the look of it.
Speaker 1:Right? Now this is a very simple way of doing prototyping. Some folks call it that kind of the skeleton approach. I don't tend to think of it as that because this is even simpler than that. In the game, for example, like I say, it's a cube.
Speaker 1:Right? And everyone kept asking me, what is that cube? Right? Is it gonna look like a cow? Is the shape gonna look like a UFO?
Speaker 1:Is it gonna be better than that? Yes. Clearly, it is. But it is not what I need for the goals of the tasks that I am working on at this time. And I think that if you do that, you will find your progress goes a lot faster.
Speaker 1:On the stream last night for about an hour and a half, I'd reached a point where I basically started to build out the game map. So I started to replace some things with more meaningful items. I have a cow that looks like a cow. I have a UFO that looks like a UFO. I've got a farmer that kind of looks like a farmer.
Speaker 1:On the ground, I've started placing buildings to get a feel for what the map is gonna be like. All of those kind of things, playing with a little bit of the lighting and some colors, all of that kind of stuff. Right? Putting a scoreboard up in the corner, all of that to now start to really build out that design. But anyway, I wanted to put that out there this week because it was fresh on my mind from doing the stream last night, and I know it's something I hadn't spoken about in a while.
Speaker 1:This is my approach, and I think you will feel your progress is a lot better if you take this approach. If you spend six hours at the beginning working on the look of a button, the complexity of an amazing looking spaceship, right, none of that tells you how does this app or game feel and work. If you go the opposite approach and you spend six hours, you will be surprised. If you do not focus on the minute details, you will be amazed at how much progress you can make in functionality and everything else in six hours if you just do that and just put very basic things on the screen. Would love to hear your thoughts on this.
Speaker 1:You can reach out to me at peterwitham dot com. How do you do things? What's your approach? If you want to reach out to me, I'd be happy to share your thoughts on the podcast with your permission, of course. Other than that, folks, have a great week.
Speaker 1:I will speak to you next