Technical Spikes vs MVP

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In software development (and product development in general) is a concept called MVP or Minimal Viable Product. According to Wikipedia it is “a product with just enough features to gather validated learning about the product and its continued development”.

My plan was to develop a Gravitas MVP in Unity and release it as quickly as possible. After reading a bit about some of the cool things I can do with Unity quite easily that would have been hard before, I inevitably got distracted. But it’s okay, since technical spikes are also an accepted part of software development (again thanks to Wikipedia: “a product-testing method that is used to determine how much work will be required to solve or work around a software issue”).

Specifically, one of the things I wanted to do in Gravitas was add a real lighting model, probably using normal mapping on the sprites. I had read up how to do this in MonoGame, but decided to see how quickly I could do it in Unity. The answer was about 2 hours. That includes the time to create the normal map for the ship (and finding a tool to help do that).

The tool I used incidentally is Sprite Illuminator from a company called CodeAndWeb. If you plan to do any 2D games I suggest you check them out. Their tools all come with trials, and the only reason I haven’t bought it is yet, is I’m deciding which bundle to get (I’ve already used Sprite Illuminator and I’ll almost certainly use Texture Packer. Physics Editor is probably less useful to me, but is only £10 extra with the other two).