Developer Blog #11: Finding Conviction

Deadlines are coming up, and I’m facing a crisis of direction. I’ve been meditating a lot on what paths to take. I’ve tested many of the potential paths yet I’m still just not sure what route to go down. I’ve created prototypes for all of my potential paths, but none of them seem to bear fruit with testers.

My default desk posture for this past week.

This past week I tested a new prototype direction, based on an idea a friend presented to me recently. The concept is simple, an arrangement of musical stars are arrayed in front of you, and when you climb on a star it plays a note. I present the player with a short melody, and their goal is to replicate the melody by grabbing the notes in the correct order. It’s a simple concept, but one that I thought had pretty interesting potential. I gave it a shot and here’s a simple video of a playthrough:

For the demo I would hum the tune players are meant to replicate.

I thought the prototype showed promise, and the gameplay could potentially be rather stimulating. I especially liked that the user draws a constellation as they climb. But after passing this through the hands of testers, it became clear to me that this game, while it could be promising, would not be relevant for VR. It would actually be more fitting as a mobile game, where the controls are simpler and the player’s attention isn’t forcibly held to the game. That’s one of the main problems I see with the puzzle genre in VR. In VR, the player is forced to face the puzzle face-first. There’s no way for them to easily context switch, and take a brief break. If the player were to take a break they would simply put down the headset and never revisit the puzzle again. I don’t see long form meditative puzzles necessarily succeeding here as a result.

And so I’m stuck, I’ve realized that the word I’m missing is: conviction. I can’t seem to hold myself to any idea or direction past the prototype. I’m so afraid of remaking the mistakes of my past, where I got too caught up in passionate vision, missing the forest for the trees, and ultimately delivering a lackluster experience. I don’t know how to find conviction and stick to anything. It seems like every idea I have is either not innovative enough, not marketable enough, or not achievable with my limited resources. To be honest, this crisis makes me close to wanting to give up. I’ve tried starting smaller mobile projects to get my mind off of things and procure an easy win, but it’s only made me more demoralized when I hit walls while developing those as well.

I found one helpful article that rather poetically described conviction to me: https://medium.com/cricket-hill/conviction-through-accomplishment-8ee90cd8a48a

And it seems like the moral of the story is to be unafraid to fail. Yet this seems to go against every fiber of my being as a prototyper. Prototypes are meant to detect potential points of failure. Yet I’m to reconcile that prototypes don’t perfectly capture the potential of the project, and my test sample size is also too small to accurately judge how most people would receive the experience.

Can’t seem to break out of the cycle.

This may be where the development process meets art, and I need to let the artist’s vision guide my direction. After all, for this project I’m the product owner in addition to the developer. Maybe I need to be a little irrational to overcome my fear of failure.

See you next week.