Comment by goldfeld | Hacker News Reader

Comment by goldfeld | Hacker News Reader

I don't mean to bash the guy, but when it comes to small software projects on a shoestring, that seem more like a side project than a stable income, I'd have been worried about any in which the project's owner and visionary isn't a coder himself. It's not that he could have kept the ball rolling the hard way, all by himself (though he could, had he been the lead programmer instead of placing that weight on a volatile hire), it's more about the morale in knowing the biggest stakeholder is also knee deep in the guts of the game. It does wonders to programmer employees, and might not have ended up with them quitting so early on.

I've been noticing this trend on Kickstarter that more and more people seem to be coming up with coding projects and then waiting on the money to solve their core problem: getting the project coded, since they can't code themselves. I don't know if it's good or bad, it's definitely good that designers can bootstrap a coding project this way, but then coding is becoming increasingly easier that I'd rather see these people learn to do it and then bring their full vision into a product. Otherwise they deny software projects their biggest advantage; that they can be done on the side with no resources but your own time, which you are more than happy to spend doing that wonderful hobby which is bulding things and seeing them work.

I'd have been worried about any in which the project's owner and visionary isn't a coder himself

I'm of mixed feelings. As a programmer and DBA myself, I would certainly find it good for the project lead to at least have programming experience so they really understood the process.

But you can be "knee deep in the guts of the game" in more ways than programming. A competent writer, level designer, or graphics artist are as deep in a game as the programmers, just in different ways. I would be extremely hesitant to back anyone who was just a "visionary" or "idea man", but I would happily support someone who had created a detailed script, level designs, and a thorough project organization plan and now needed programmers to turn that highly detailed set of requirements into code.

As much as I agree with you on other parts being as much important, I wasn't necessarily meaning an artistically accomplished project, as long as an MVP could be put out. And unless Mr. Dakan is writer, game designer and graphic artist all-in-one, there seems to be the case that the project was mothballed because of a lack of coding, not of any of those other things.

In the end, average-quality work on all these other fronts is much more easily replaced or makeshifted than code, even if poor code. Without a programmer who can make progress, even if not maintainable in the future, the project halts, as it has. Or it has to resign to being a board game, a story or a graphic novel, and not an interactive digital game.

Meanwhile, a sufficiently creative coder who is the project lead can probably come up with placeholders for everything else. Or call upon the community. People seem to be far more eager to offer game design and writing ideas than to jump in and code. You could even outsource parts of design on marketplaces like 99designs. Code isn't easily outsourced, one must have a whole understanding of it, or at least of each component, and there's always the (mostly exacerbated) fear of being copied.

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