Authors
FingerTips Personalizer Framework has been conceived and authored by the founders of
Software Species, Mikhail Zislis (MZ) and
Sergey Salomakhin (SS). Around year 2001, MZ spent some time watching one his esteemed
colleagues. The fellow was busy tweaking the settings of a game, a first-person action adventure. The game,
to say the least, had graphics stunning for that time, immersive gameplay and enjoyable sound. It also
featured a multitude of controls and option settings.
The fellow went through several cycles of re-tweaking, until he finally got the all
settings right and could start playing. Overall, it took him about fifteen minutes to get into active
gameplay. MZ knew him as a hardcore game player, the guy'd never miss an FPS title in his life, he used
to fine-tune minor parameters when playing Counter-Strike. Hardcore gamer? Fifteen minutes? Ah, MZ thought,
the game was flawed. No transparency in the control system.
Then, just a few hours later, it suddenly occurred to MZ that most modern computer games
were flawed in the same way. While providing quality gameplay, they torture us with a sophisticated kill-time
device - the process of configuring controls and settings.
In the older days, games were simpler, so no complex controls and options sets existed.
Today, you'll spend ten minutes only to initially tweak the control system. And when already in gameplay you
suddenly realize the misunderstanding between you and the game's developers, you'll go back to
configuration. This does not contribute to the positive gaming experience.
The solution seemed natural. In fact, it has been partially implemented many times, but the
parts never came together in a single standard production methodology. That's how Personalizer was born; as a
means to reduce time-to-gameplay, to simplify the game configuration process down to a no-brainer task, to
automate as much of the process as possible.
When we started out, the project seemed like an overnight thing to us. In fact, MZ
remembers creating the very first version of the Personalizer DTD (yes, it was a DTD back then)
in several hours. He then shared the idea with SS, and everything went downhill from there, because
SS started asking questions that any person deep into gaming would ask. What is it, really? How will it work?
What will the developer do? How will the gamer see the whole thing, if ever? Were it not for all these
questions, the system would see light immediately and be deservedly rejected.
Thanks to SS's inquiries, the discussion of various aspects of Personalizer stretched over
months and resulted into an internal design specification that served us hand and foot in the years (yes, years)
of development ahead. Because life was hard at work on interrupting our development efforts, we always kept at hand the
design spec to refresh our memories.
The system kept evolving in a way an epic novel does: portions of it redesigned and rewritten,
concepts accepted and discarded, it gradually transitioned through no less than three major revamps. Even though
we put considerable thought into the initial design, only after all these 'software belle-lettres' we arrived at
an implementation that gives no pangs of conscience when we call it release candidate.
For a long time, every change in the design seemed like a punishment. Changes moved the day of
the release further away, again and again, and that was very painful. Today, we are happy that it went the way it
did. Imagine Umberto Eco writing
"The Name of the rose" in a month. Our bet is that both the author and his readers would miss a lot of
fun that way.
When you don't really have any deadlines around your neck, you can proceed at any pace.
For many projects where business concerns outweigh product development matters or where stretching timelines
endlessly is not viable, any pace is not an option. Lucky us, heh? We've used our chance to liken software to
literature and try to live through the comparison.
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Personalizer Authors |
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 Mikhail Zislis
Concepts, Programming, Research
MSN: Icon__@hotmail.com
Sergey Salomakhin
Concepts, Research, Testing
MSN: dazuppa@yahoo.com
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