From the trenches of project Maguro, part 3

Project Maguro is fin­ished and on this Mon­day, we’re doing a quick eval­u­a­tion. Enter­ing the war room pro­vides us with an inter­est­ing sen­sa­tion. It’s as if we can still smell the gun pow­der. Hear explo­sions faintly, in the dis­tance — but only when lis­ten­ing intently. Sit­ting down, it feels like we’re expected to start crunch­ing again. But all that is his­tory now. At the end of every­thing, what remains is for­mal­i­ties, food and fun.

It takes a while for the real­iza­tion to truly sink in. The project that kept Kars, Karel, Alper, Simon and me busy dur­ing the early part of 2011 is done. It’s been deliv­ered to the client, as well as to the client’s client. And all lay­ers of client seem to be happy. Which, in turn, makes us happy.

By the time you read this, our project has been revealed as being called Code 4. And the ‘large gov­ern­men­tal organ­i­sa­tion’ we made it for, turns out to be the Dutch Tax Admin­is­tra­tion. Cur­rently the game’s had mul­ti­ple runs and should be caus­ing orga­ni­za­tional change like there’s no tomor­row, right now.

Asked by Kars how I feel about the project, the thoughts that pop up are not really about Maguro — they’re about me, and about these other guys. As a writer, free­lancer, web guy, I’m used to work­ing alone. Twit­ter, Face­book and e-mail are my only con­tact with the out­side world. Projects seam­lessly flow into one another. I don’t think about my processes, they just hap­pen instinc­tively. All that changes when you work in a team. Which took a while to adjust to — but I think I nailed it in the end.

And what a team it was. I guess it felt like being in a rock band because that’s what I asso­ciate with a bunch of smart, too-cool-for-school kids, each com­plete with their own incred­i­ble super pow­ers. (That’s a link to the first part in this series, which is wrapped up by this post. Be sure to also read the mid­dle episode. You know what they say about mid­dle episodes in trilogies.)

I then say some­thing about the game’s iter­a­tive devel­op­ment process, which revolved so fast that each pro­to­type felt more like a tram­po­line than the intended quiet moment of reflec­tion. It’s a mir­a­cle that in the end, the plan got together — which I love. Or maybe it’s just a lot of intel­li­gence, expe­ri­ence, hard work and per­se­ver­ance stacked together. In a box. With a ribbon.

We head out to Luce, where they serve great cock­tails and grappa, it turns out. The food is nice, too. An iPhone game called Coin Drop is dis­cussed, which I dis­miss as being a poor man’s Peg­gle, but end up spend­ing the next few days get­ting all of the game’s stars any­way. Next, we deter­mine that the idea that doing some­thing in real life is always bet­ter than doing it vir­tu­ally, is a decid­edly calvin­is­tic way of see­ing things. After which we all agree that games are really about learn­ing to learn.

Late at night, Karel starts draw­ing up two of the game con­cepts swirling around that enig­matic mind of his. Nat­u­rally, the end of project Maguro is the begin­ning of some­thing new.