Hacker News Reader

Comment by snorkel | Hacker News Reader

I'm embarking on a similar hands-on exercise with my own 5 year old son called "let's make an iPhone game". I'm letting him completely define the plot, the characters, the actions, and overall requirements no matter how nonsensical it all seems, I don't debate his choices, I just take requirements as is. I have him involved with every step from designing the artwork, the music, the sounds, the actions, and he is quite obsessed with working on this project continuaously. I don't expect he'll know all the details of how the game works but I want to demonstrate that he can create fun things using a computer.

The refreshing part of getting software requirements from a child is there's no tedious debate about implementation details, timelines, and business value. "The cowboy is only on level 2 and level 4 because his friend is the mosquitto." OK, whatever, nonsense but perhaps no more ridiculous than Pac Man.

View on HN

"OK, whatever, nonsense but perhaps no more ridiculous than Pac Man."

Love it. Break down Super Mario Bros. sometime. "So there's this guy, he's a plumber and has a huge mustache, he runs left to right and jumps on enemy mushrooms, but if he eats different ones (which he gets by hitting floating blocks with question marks on them) he gets bigger. Eating flowers lets him shoot fireballs, which kills anything that doesn't have a shell, except for the hammer brothers and Bowser. When he eats stars (that he's extracted out of the more floating question mark blocks) he becomes invincible for a short period of time. At the end of every level he sees how high up a flag pole he can jump. Oh and there's a princess you are saving or something who's always in a different castle then the one you are in. Every living thing in the world is pretty much made of poison since you die as soon as you touch pretty much anything. Oh, and some turtles can fly."

and jumps on enemy mushrooms

Goombas are actually chestnuts.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Goomba

Because that makes it less nonsensical. :-)

Thankyou. I cant read the article from work as we block anything with the word games in the meta tags. But your post gave me most of the gist as well as making me smile with what you are doing. My hats off to you.

Let's hope game theory will never be applicable to your line of work.

I suggest reading the article when you can, as that post wasn't actually very similar to it.

I'm not sure if you need to be logged in to Instapaper to see this, but here is a text summary that has all the content: http://www.instapaper.com/text?u=http%3A%2F%2Fmartinkool.com...

Thanks. Work fine without logging in.

hey yassim, my workplace does that as well. I usually circumvent that by adding 'cache:' in front of the web address to pull the google cache (This might only be applicable on Google chrome, though)

Thanks. I'm surprised that actually worked here since proxy information is also semi locked down. I shall have to remember this trick in future.

Fantastic! And what are you using to build the game?

Reply on news.ycombinator.com