Should Developers Play City Building Games?
I don’t usually play computer games because of my tight schedule, but when I do, I play strategies. I used my Easter break to try a quite popular city planning game. I immediately recognized a lot of tactics and ways of thinking I could move into my software development experience.
Can playing city-planning games enhance your software developer career?
I will try to answer that question in this article.
Expansion
The main objective of a city-planning game is to establish a city and expand it to its reasonable limits. The more districts the city has, the harder it gets to develop due to the accumulation of design mistakes. In other words, fixing issues in a faulty city might prove challenging.
Software products are alike; the goal is to sell them to a realistic number of customers. Architectural mistakes can delay the development of an application. In the past, some companies chose to rewrite their products instead of repairing them.
Cities, especially in America, have been built on the grid pattern. This simplifies distance calculations and allows people to predict city expansion. Software developers use patterns as well — we call them the design patterns.
Complexity
Cities are complex by nature; mayors need to take into account people, buildings, traffic, workplaces, water, electricity. Have I mentioned healthcare, police, or firefighting? What about the very administration that runs a city?
Are products complicated as well? As they require the cooperation of many people, they tend to get complex. Modern companies involve product managers, developers, designers, testers to build software. Not to mention support, sales, or management, who are also involved.
Is planning necessary? I would say yes, as a city planner is a legitimate career opportunity. I can say the same about software architects. If you want to control complexity, plan.
Statistics
It is nigh impossible to know what is happening in a city without any metrics. How many schools do you need to build? Well, that depends on the age demographics of your city!
Products need metrics as well, especially for tracking errors. It is reasonable to know about performance too. Not to mention the healthy service instances.
Metrics can tell if we are running into multiple problems at the same time.
City Lifecycles
Humans, buildings, and vehicles have obvious lifecycles. In life, everything changes all the time. As we age, we require different services. A well-designed city needs to provide said services.
Each product has its lifecycle. Product lifecycle management is a business term; understanding it can assist companies in proper decision-making.
Operations within an application can trigger a cycle that could be analyzed. Some processes move through multiple services before finishing. Perhaps they could be simplified or speeded up?
Traffic
No city can exist without proper traffic management. Jammed roads might prove fatal for the injured if ambulances cannot get to them in time. People should be able to choose between multiple ways of getting to work.
When dealing with traffic, you should always look for possible improvements, like alternate routes. It is crucial to understand why roads clog as well.
Internet traffic is similar, only we analyze packets instead of vehicles. Controlling traffic created by the usage of an application is crucial. Who wants to use a slow product, anyway?
Resources
In nowadays cities, everything revolves around money. So much so that cities borrow money to deliver on unkept promises to its citizen. There is a beautiful symmetry in that to the product world, isn’t there?
A city needs to make money to be stable to afford necessary maintenance. Products need to earn cash to have their companies fix bugs and keep the servers online.
Simulation
Every city planning game I know of is a simulation. This means that the game works only as a model of the real world. The accuracy of this model depends on the innovation of the game creators and the computing power of your computer.
How do we, developers, call the simulation of a project?
Testing.
Research
I believe you cannot get good results in city-planning games without proper research. The Internet contains a lot of materials on how to solve common problems. Some people went as far as to create guidelines for every aspect of the game they were playing.
I can tell without a shadow of a doubt that most developers consult others on their professional issues. Some use the Internet, some use books. I think every programmer should know how to use the search engine proficiently.
Summary
Can playing city-planning games enhance your software developer career? I asked that question at the beginning of this article.
My answer is — it depends. Experienced developers probably will play such games the way they approach software, planning first and then coding. Others might be inclined to rush in, just to hit an obstacle and quit.
Generally, I believe you should always consider trying new things to expand your perspective and skills.
