Light Infantry Game Developers

Modern light infantry is lethal.  They are the fighters who win wars in this 4thGeneration of War as described by William S. Lind.  They are mobile, adaptable, and always ready to seize the initiative from their more rigid enemies. 

I was so very happy to find out that our DevGame projects were designed to get us developing a game the way light infantry fights.  Instead of being handed a design doc that specified every bit of minutia and being expected to follow it with religious fervor, we were give goals to achieve.

My group was told to make a modern version of the ancient computer game “Spacewar!,” and make it a network game for 3 vs 3 dogfights.  That was basically all the instruction we were given.  Don’t get me wrong, we’d already had a few sessions of the course and discussed all sorts of game design concepts.  We’d heard from game industry professionals.  Surely we were ready to dive in and give it a try, right?

Well, that didn’t make us feel comfortable as we started.  Neither I nor the other programmer on the project had ever programmed in Unity.  (Getting up to speed on Unity deserves a bunch of posts, and I hope I or one of the programmers will have the time to do it justice.) I’ve never made a fully functional game.  And, the whole team has all sorts of other time commitments that would have to take priority.

Light infantry are trained to get used to the uncomfortable feeling of the unknown.  They are taught to thrive on it when others fall apart, even using it as a weapon against troops that are trained to know what to expect all the time.  I’m getting the feeling that being a successful game designer or producer requires the same sort of immunity to the unknown.