"We set up a small group of people to take every silly idea, every cool trick, everything interesting that existed in any kind of working state somewhere in the

"We set up a small group of people to take every silly idea, every cool trick, everything interesting that existed in any kind of working state somewhere in the game and put them into a single prototype level. When the level started to get fun, they added more variations of the fun things. If an idea wasn’t fun, they cut it. When they needed a software feature, they simplified it until it was something that could be written in a few days. They all worked together on this one small level for a month while the rest of us basically did nothing. When they were done, we all played it. It was great." Nice illustration of Gail's Law, from a comment [1] on HN today: "A complex system that works is invariably found to have evolved from a simple system that worked. The inverse proposition also appears to be true: A complex system designed from scratch never works and cannot be made to work. You have to start over, beginning with a working simple system." http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gall%27s_law http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gall%27s_law [1] http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=775134 http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=775134