Show HN: We have tested the LEAN approach and here's a game we made in 5 weeks

http://www.kixel.co

by ocivelek • 13 years ago

2 3 13 years ago

david_shaw• 13 years ago

Great presentation, and although I haven't played the game, it looks really fun.

You guys should be very happy you came up with something that seems so cool in any amount of time; the fact that this was built in five weeks is, to me, pretty mind-blowing.

It's great to see what motivated people can achieve when they set their minds to it!

Do you have any further information regarding how you guys went about building this? How big is your team? Were you working full-time during the last five weeks?

ocivelek2• 13 years ago

We started with a single developer and an artist. And two weeks ago a GUI developer joined the team. The team has been working full time on this.

How we did it? Well, we came up with a few leap of faith questions, like : "Nowadays most football games are too complicated to play and if we build what feels like arcade, people would enjoy playing it" and we started building minimum thing which we can test if we were right or not. This is where we are by the end of the 5th week :)

ocivelek2• 13 years ago

We have been doing agile development with a separate product management team writing down user stories for us. But the issue of defining "completeness" has been created a lot of frictions. While considering the development approach for our new spin off game studio, we came across LEAN approach and we are really proud of how much we could put in there within 5 weeks and we feel like most of that effort has been put as in "working code".

LEAN approach not only helped us with the amount of visibility on the product we are working on, but also re-shaped the way we think about "completeness" of a feature. Result of the experiment: happier team, more code in production, 2 or 3 builds a day.

Strongly suggested for small teams, who have less to waste. That's what I wish to share with friends working in startups around the globe.

Show HN: We have tested the LEAN approach and here's a game we made in 5 weeks

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