iterative and incremental

Finishing a novel is a lot of work.

Very few people start and finish one.

That’s why it’s no surprise that even fewer people finish an interactive story.

Everything we take into account to make a good novel is multiplied by a number that may or may not be under our control.

That’s why we have to start slowly and not try to solve all the problems at once.

If ID Software had done that, we wouldn’t have Wolfenstein or Doom. Just Quake.

In software engineering, the Agile community has a concept that I adopted as a philosophy: iterative and incremental.

What does this mean? It means starting from scratch and doing the minimum to feel like there was progress.

This could be writing a linear interactive story with a single character.

Once we finish that, we can take another step and adjust our process to support something more complicated.

Now we can create a story with a unique ending but with some cosmetic branches.

Then more branches and maybe two endings.

We iterate on this and create a story where the character has two “personalities” and interacts with a character that reacts to this.

And so on.

This doesn’t mean you should release stories to the world that you’re not happy with.

You don’t need to publish those stories if they don’t live up to what you want to be known for.

The important thing is that the byproduct of finishing an entire story is a process.

And by adding something in the next iteration, that process will change.

But there is a hormesis process you need to go through.

Every element you add to your process will damage it.

The process needs some time to find a new balance.

If we try to mix all the elements at once without having a system, the result will probably be exhaustion and cognitive overload.

Remember: iterative and incremental.