This past week, I was working on my final project proposal for my Microprocessors class. The night before the proposal was due, me and my partner Amy decided to make the bold descision to scrap our entire project idea and start over. Why? Because it was getting just way too complicated for us to reasonably finish. We were planning to make a playable game, using RFID as a gimmick — think something like amiibo. But as we were talking each other through the idea, we just realized that even though we had already spent the entire week before that iterating on this, it was going to be too overly complicated to work.

I think taking a step back, and evaluating how feasible the project might be was a really good idea. We reduced the scope of our project. Instead of making a complicated game with RFID signals, we decided to just drive a LED matrix display, and write a small interactive 2D physics engine that takes real world input from a gyroscope and accelerometer. A fun, sweet, and contained project.

When I told a friend about this idea, they thought it was boring. But I think instead of being boring, it’s just something that’s perfectly achievable. This especially reminds me a lot of my experience with game development. A lot of the “best” games, the games most fun to play, often are quite simple. Instead of having tons of features, a lot of them keep it simple, with a well defined scope that they do very well. It’s really nice in the ideation phase to just keep on adding more and more ideas because they all sound cool on their own. But at some point, the reality is those ideas need to be integrated and put together. I’m quite optimistic on the direction this final project will take, and I’m looking forward to posting an update on here sometime in the coming weeks.