First, something you can touch

This is how I work: an idea comes in, and we build something you can touch right away.

Around 2014 my partners and I started a card game. They began with sign-up, password recovery and the profile page. I suggested starting with the core: how the cards are dealt and how the game actually plays. You don’t need a login at that stage; the player’s name can go in the URL. My partners were surprised by that. I built my part, and the project that was started “professionally”, with a chat, Jira and documentation, never got to the actual game.

In 2011–2012 there was Spell Defense: you draw a spell with a gesture on your phone, and it hits waves of enemies. I built the monsters’ path graph with interpolation straight away. The team disappeared, and that work went almost unchanged into Steam Defense.

On Steam Defense, instead of endless discussions in the chat, I built an MVP in about 10 days of work: you could walk, shoot and build, so there was something to show investors.

On Roach Racing my partners wanted a video for investors with running models, essentially a fake. Instead, in about a month I built a real prototype: real-time 3D multiplayer in the browser. That prototype, almost without rewriting, grew into production.

What I took from it: a working prototype convinces better than slides and forms. And a good MVP isn’t thrown away; it grows. That’s how I work as a fractional CTO too.