#protoyping

D20 Jewelry, A History pt 4 In 2017 it occurred to me that I was marketing to poors like myself... And that poors probably aren't the best market for novelty, meh-quality jewelry. Cause, y'know. Rent and stuff. So, I went on the legitimately scary journey of tripling the material cost to make it a premium, completely stainless steel product. 🏋💪 

Today was a pretty busy day. I think I’m actually finished with the prototype. I’ve checked off all the items I had on my list.

I fixed the drag (it was too strong), and updated the navigation to correctly handle gliding missiles. It made long range missile shots possible. The first several screenshots are of a 15 mile shot from 10k feet at mach 1 with a Sparrow. Combination of speed and altitude allowed it to glide into the target at 550 knots. That’s super neat.

So neat that I spent a lot of time just tweaking settings and playing around with the missiles. It’s really cool seeing how dramatically different the flight profiles of each missile are, as well how your relative speed and altitude to the target make a massive difference in how likely you are to hit the target.

Trying to fire a Sidewinder while chasing a supersonic target is probably not going to work. Its motor burns out very quickly. However, a longer ranged missile like an AMRAAM, or especially the Sparrow with its super long sustain motor, can keep its speed up long enough to hit.

I started to reference DCS for missile motors, and realized I didn’t have two stage motors, so I added them. In the 4th screenshot, the break in the trail is the missile switching from its boost motor to its sustain motor. This gave a very different flight profile to the Sparrow, making it a very long range missile.

Once upon a time, paper prototypes were amazing, radical tools that could predict the future. You could come in on Monday and start sketching and have a full working design in front of users by Friday. Don’t laugh. Until paper-prototypes came along, teams could take up to six weeks to get that far.

By 2004, developers had discovered—and embraced—agile. It gave them the ability to move quickly from one iteration to another, testing with users every step of the way.

Ten years later, responsive design rules, and there’s no such thing as “one design to rule them all.” Now that you’re working with gestures and touch interfaces, you can’t rely on a small collection of design patterns to handle every use case.

Quick prototypes have always been the answer. And these days, designers and developers have to work together in a way we’ve never seen before. Collaboration helps them get to a better design faster.

This is so unimpressive looking but there's so much going on to get everything loading and working together.

Start screen, then planning screen. Planning screen you can select planes and a target. You can only start the mission if your plane has enough range. Once you start the mission, it loads a different battle depending on the target. One is some buildings. The other is a dumbbell shaped bunker. You can fly around in there, and then when you win (winning/losing are just buttons right now) it smoothly goes back to the planning screen.

I want to get proper communication working between the planning and battle maps so that a target is removed or something, but that has a ton of implications to it that I just don't have right now, so I'm not sure I want to do it for this super rough prototype. It’d probably work to just have something drawn on top of it to show it’s been destroyed or something. That’d be good enough for this.

Either way, I definitely do want to get at some kind of information going back and forth between scenes to get an idea for how that could work.