| Let me hijack this with a hate story about my wife and minigolf games. Back in 1996 she thought maybe she needed a hobby. She was a housewife and we didn’t have any children yet. She said maybe she could do a game. At the time I was working in Microsoft C++ and the Microsoft Foundation Classes framework, building Windows apps. She had never programmed a language more challenging than Turbo Pascal. When she asked how long it would take to even get started, I estimated about 18 months to learn C++ properly, another six months to learn Microsoft foundation classes. The six months after that to learn the windows API if she worked really hard at it. At the time I thought maybe there was a place in the Windows game market for a mini golf game. She took less than a week to create a working, bug-free prototype, but then lost interest. I hate people like that! Everything takes forever for me to learn. Luckily she blessed me with a passel of pretty much bug-free and absolutely hilarious children, so I’m giving her a pass. |
This is pretty common, no? Same reason why everyone thinks AI will change development: people mistake the initial time cost of building an initial prototype for being representative of the total cost of making the thing people actually demand (which mostly never happens).