The Unimaginarium of Dr Downie

29 Apr 2013

For a long time I have wanted to make something cool. Something useful and unique that people would use and say “Wow, I’d never have thought of that”. Something truly special. In short I want to make the coding equivalent of Reggae Reggae Sauce.

However I have come to realise that I am an unimaginative, code monkey; and worst of all I’m OK with that!

This weekend I set out to make a quirky and elegantly simple game for the Ludlum Dare game jam and for the life of me could not come up with a single achievable idea. Much to my chagrin, one of my work colleagues produced a beautifully addictive and simple little flash game and most horrifyingly it is not the first time he has done so. I, on the other hand; can only seem to think iteratively. Take some existing idea and make it bigger and better. Even during the Tag game jams (one of which my team emerged victorious) our ideas are always creaking under the burden of their own feature sets and inevitably the time required to read the tutorial far exceeds the original development time. I seem to be much more “Zoom Zoom Zoom!” than “The car in front is a Toyota”.

Yet give me an idea or a design and I can provide simple, elegant and innovative coding solutions and derive a great deal of pleasure in doing so. The world needs artists and ideas but it also needs mechanics and brickies.

So until I stumble upon the next best thing has anyone got anything they need me to be getting on with?