It's all about perception

Back in 2011, I entered a student project competition. As a five-person team, we had to devise, design, and build a software project.

Naturally, we tried to build a game. Let’s do something like the legendary Transport Tycoon but in a browser. Multiplayer. Real-time.

Ambitious? Yes.

Doable? Kinda.

It was a time when browser sockets and node.js were becoming hot.

After a few months of experimenting, we realized we wouldn’t meet the deadline.

We had a shitty game. It was not fun to play. Lots of work left.

But it ran, and the tech behind it was cool—multiplayer in a browser.

So, we decided to pivot from our bad game being the product to:

Yes, the game is bad, but it’s just a demo of what this amazing piece of technology can do. Here’s the framework that runs it.

We won that competition.

Sometimes, all you need to do is to tell a better story.

It’s a lesson I employed often since then.

The code is the code. A feature is a feature.

How you present it to your team, the board, the CTO, and your clients matters more than you think.

Find out what story you need to tell to get the result that you want.

Best regards,

Taj

P.S. Here’s what my “game” looked like over 13 years ago when I still had plenty of hair, a youthful passion, and just a few seeds of wisdom. 👇🏻

The sharp-eyed may have noticed we pivoted from trains to tanks for the demo game. The gameplay was supposed to be very similar to Into the Breach (Subset Games, 2018). But it never went beyond a tech demo.