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Fail Faster, and Follow the Fun
In 2001, I attended a workshop at GDC taught by one Marc "MAHK" LeBlanc. Over the course of those two days, I would be exposed to a great deal of development wisdom (and if you haven't attended one of Marc's sessions, what the hell have you been doing? Go, people Go!), but there were five words in particular that Marc shoved odwn our collective throats that have completely altered the course of my career.
Fail faster. Follow the fun.
Those words are a complete methodology for how not to be eaten by snakes, and perhaps succeed, when pushing into the wilderness of the New.
Marc repeated the phrase endlessly, until there was absolutely no chance that anyone in that room would ever forget them. Here, Im going to continue the cycle of abuse, and do my damnedest to inflict the same brain wound on as many readers of this magazine as I can. It worked on me, so maybe it will work on you.
So, full credit goes to Marc LeBlanc. Also, fail faster, people. Fail faster! And, follow the goddamn fun.
Scope: When to apply the 4F method
Before the brain wounding, though, let's talk about limits. This "4F" method does not necessarily aaply to everything.
What we will be discussing is most useful when you are exploring the New. Though failing faster does have some application when making small iterations on a known design, you can actually succeed without doing it if you have a strong template in front of you (heresy!).
However.
If you are making something new from scratch that you have no reasonable guide for, then your situation is somewhat more dire. In the end, all of the success you will have in finding the functional New will come from the moments when you first fail (and you will fail; in fact, thats the next step), quickly recover, and then follow what shards of fun you may have managed to discover. Everything else will be a waste of time and resources.
Fail early, fail often
We game developers hate this word, generally.
Oh, sure, if we are sitting around a table sipping the mind-altering beverage of our choice amongst our industry comrades, we will...