As posted on http://www.teamfortress.com .
A Heavy Problem
July 1, 2008 - Robin Walker
As Gabe mentioned in his lengthy response to an email recently, the next class pack will focus on the Heavy. For the Medic and Pyro packs we kept our goals for the pack pretty close to our chest, but for the Heavy we've decided to open up the process a little. Our hope is that you'll get a better insight into how we approach design problems, and have some fun thinking about the problem yourself. We do design collaboratively at Valve, and one of the side effects of it is that we really need to be able to evaluate design ideas as objectively as possible. Otherwise design meetings would devolve into subjective arguing. We've found that the best method of working objectively is to have clear goals up front. Once we've got clear goals, we can throw a bunch of ideas up on the board and measure how well each idea achieves those goals. Often the work of testing those ideas against the goals causes us to further refine or clarify the goals.
July 1, 2008 - Robin Walker
As Gabe mentioned in his lengthy response to an email recently, the next class pack will focus on the Heavy. For the Medic and Pyro packs we kept our goals for the pack pretty close to our chest, but for the Heavy we've decided to open up the process a little. Our hope is that you'll get a better insight into how we approach design problems, and have some fun thinking about the problem yourself. We do design collaboratively at Valve, and one of the side effects of it is that we really need to be able to evaluate design ideas as objectively as possible. Otherwise design meetings would devolve into subjective arguing. We've found that the best method of working objectively is to have clear goals up front. Once we've got clear goals, we can throw a bunch of ideas up on the board and measure how well each idea achieves those goals. Often the work of testing those ideas against the goals causes us to further refine or clarify the goals.
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