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Comment by 11ren | Hacker News Reader

I find 40 hours is much more productive if spread over several weeks. Maybe one's unconscious works on it the rest of the time.

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That reminds me of a story I read about Michelangelo. He stared at the lump of marble that was to become David for a very long time before making the first cut, when asked what he was doing he said "I'm working"

I think the one I've heard goes, the artist is imagining the sculpture beneath that lump of marble, and they explain the actual creation of it as just removing everything else that's not the sculpture.

I saw David in Florence, and I was amazed to see that they also had on display the prototypes for David. There were 3 or 4 or so. From memory, they were all massive blocks of marble, though some just had an arm or leg sticking out. I guess these are called "studies" or drafts. A bit more heavy-weight than a study for a painting.

If he could permit himself to start over several times, I can too.

If you read about small-scale game development, this is a common practice. Danc (http://www.lostgarden.com/) talks a lot about rapid prototyping. Since games have a clear but poorly-defined goal (they have to be "fun"), it's easy to make a limited product around a proposed method of finding that fun, and then either going along with it or throwing it out if it doesn't seem promising. Thus, you can (and probably will) start over several times before making a complete, polished game.

I agree with your points, though I keep coming across variants of rapid prototyping in different fields; and as Fred Brooks told us "build one to throw away".

Is it possible to have a "clear but poorly-defined goal", or are you having a joke? "Fun" is an emergent property - recognizable, measurable but the creation isn't formalizable (though BTW your link mentioned something about game grammars...)

Clear, meaning: we want our games to be fun. Startups also have pretty clear goals: make something of value and make tons of money while doing it.

Poorly-defined, meaning: one man's fun is another man's boredom, it's hard to pin down what exactly "fun" is. Thankfully, though, there are many good educated guesses, so we can't act like "fun" is impossible to define.

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