The backstory for this game is explained in this post.

The point of this game is to reduce friction in the creative process. It's inspired by the same message have heard in many contexts, including a lecture from The Sims creator Will Wright, Art and Fear by Bayles and Orland,The Art of Game Design by Schell and The Lean Startup by Ries. The central point in all of them is that if you want to make something good, the most important thing is to iterate. It doesn't matter if your next iteration is good, it's that the next iteration happens as fast as possible and you learn from it. And the more you iterate, the better the end result becomes.

The difficult part is that for some reason it is often very hard to trust this process. It feels like if I make something that's not good, then I'm not good, and therefore making bad things can feel threatening. There are also other ways to get stuck, like not being able to pick what to work on next out of many options. So the purpose of this game is to turn it into a game, because, as explained in the backstory post, games allow you to take on a set of values temporarily. Whether or not you actually are able to trust the iterative process, if you can play a game where that process happens and accept the goals of that game for the duration of play, then you could have an easier time to go through it.

Here are the rules:

Goal

Create as many prototypes as possible in a set amount of time.

Rules

Set a timer for the amount of time you want to play. 1 hour is a good starting point, but it can be longer or shorter. The timer has to be set beforehand, and the playing stops the moment the timer ends.
Write down what you want to test with your next prototype. It can be a new feature, idea, variation, modification, removal, emotional response, risk to the project, fix, etc. Write it down. One sentence is enough, but more is allowed.
Create a prototype that tests what you wrote down in step 2.
Capture the result of the test in whatever way works. E.g. screenshots, photos, video recordings, audio recordings, text excerpts.
Write down what you learned from creating the prototype. One sentence is enough, but more is allowed.
Return to step 2.

If the timer ends while you are on steps 4 or 5, you may finish the cycle.
At the end of the game, collect all of the cycles in one place. Make seeing the test description, result capture and learnings of each cycle as easy as possible, ideally in a way where you can easily see all the other cycles too.
The number of times you have completed the loop is your score. The higher the score, the better.

The hope is that this set of rules will make you want to create as many bad iterations as possible. I tried it by creating the first prototypes of the cycling game, and it worked pretty well! Here are the logs from the two iterations I got done in the hour I set for myself. There's clear improvement, and there was no pressure to have anything be good. Things were broken and looked ugly. It's fine. On to the next iteration.

Cycle 1

Goals
- I want to have a site, optimized for mobile, where the game takes data from LiveTrack and shows the player on a map.
Evaluation
- There's no real game or goal yet. And the app doesn't work very well for mobile on a bike because there's goal.

Cycle 2

Goals
- There's scrolling on the page. There shouldn't be.
- I think instead of going as far as possible in a given time, the goal should be to get to the goal as fast as possible. This changes the evaluation structure a bit
- For more game mechanics, use e-bike assistance features. Give the player boost they can use.
- Have there be an actual game.
Evaluation
- I will need to test the game to know if it's fun, but at least the idea seems better with there being no need to cycle aimlessly.
- I think the boost idea is a good stab at adding some game mechanics. I'd like to do more
- Maybe I could read the data from the bike to use points whenever I actually change assist modes. Based on my earlier investigations into getting bike data out, it should be doable. Not having to touch the phone would be good. And if I can capture the button presses from the controller, I can control the game UI in all sorts of ways.

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