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Comment by tetrisgm | Hacker News Reader

Disclaimer: I was a PM on Angry Birds.

This is such a great demo. The original used Box2D,LUA scripting, and of course you had to make enemies and levels.

There's obviously no expectation that you'd make a hit game from the tech in its current state. You're bound to be limited by the tech, rather than your own skills.

But for rapid ideas, for prototypes, for game jams, this is a game changer. I can also see it as a great alternative to Scratch for kids to play around with ideas. Hope to see more platforms try to turn this into an offering!

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Nice, what's the craziest story about your time here

Would derail the thread pretty hard and I'm not sure even which one to pick. But my favorite memory was walking the streets of Seoul and getting in a little street market. There was this kid who was the son of the shop owner, playing on a cheap Android device. Super into the last update we shipped. You could tell he was gonna sit there on the floor in the corner and this would be his day. I was suddenly so self conscious about how we made levels and updates. Until then it was just the next update at the office, we had to make it good and polished and respectful of the player. But now it was this kid's world, much like Super Mario Bros had been to me. It was important. It was a really humbling moment.

It would be wonderful if such stories were more prevalent and lauded in the overall industry: at the ens of the day, it's not about specific tech but about how we end up affecting concrete lives. Human-computer interaction as a research field is all about this; seeing the others' perspective. Sadly it's seems to be largely seen as niche activity by the wider community.

I'd argue it's the most important goal of all consumer software. It needs to be respectful of the player. To do that you need to really, actually care about where they are in their lives and what you can do to meet them. We had an expression internally: "surprise and delight". On a more personal level I've always loved Gunpei Yokoi's "lateral thinking, with withered technology".

That might be a good approach for games and other apps with a certain level of redundancy and competition. But the other approach is having a vital product with high vendor lock-in factor, then eliminating the competition and consequentially forcing down the throats of customers whatever is promising more profit (browsers, "big" ERP, ...).

That's just so sad to read. Yes, I'm aware there are alternatives to respecting users. You use apps that dgaf every day. I'm saying it's important to care, not just for yourself and your career and market share, but because there's a human who's living their life and you can make it a but better with a bit of effort. Besides the lack of empathy and respect for humans in your answer, there is also just a sadness in giving up trying to aspire to do better and just do a bunch of cheap tricks to win.

Wow, I was certainly not embracing that other approach, just observing that it exists and that it is popular for corps in some areas of the industry.

Personally, I am highly user oriented, but there are constraints on what I can do for them, in my area.

I think many of us would love to hear more. Not looking for gossip or anything, just good stories about some technical hurdle you've overcome, or a special moment like this one you've just described.

Whats a good way to do this, an AMA?

That, or a tellHN text story with questions following ?

If you wrote your story as a blogpost and linked it as a submission, that'd probably be fine. It's how most posts here are structured.

Is there something specific to Angry Birds development that many of you find appealing?

It's one of the most successful projects of the early mobile games era. That makes me think it must be rich with fascinating stories.

Not "one of". It exceeded 2bn downloads.

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