Burka: It’s very bizarre to be working on a game. It’s not something I really expected to be doing. The game is coming along really well. I’m really excited about it. I joined in October when the project was already fairly started, and for the last month we’ve been building a lot of disparate tools—all the bits that will function soon as a full game. Over the last few months, it feels like we’ve been working in a bit of a thick fog, and just in the last month or two, it’s suddenly coming into focus, and instead of being just solely a bunch of tools, it’s starting to develop into content, and fun, and an actual game. You can sit down for a few hours and really play, and there’s continuity and narrative in there. That’s really fun.
But it’s weird; things move and there are lots of different challenges that are very, very different from building web apps. The idea that friction can be a good thing in a game—a large part of game play is about friction and overcoming challenges—which is a very different kind of UI problem than we deal with in web applications. The other big challenge for me is that there’s a very, very deep history in game UI design. In web applications, we’re pretty much in our diapers. I’m not that old and I was there near the beginning of the Web, and we’ve learned some conventions and we’ve figured some things out, but game UI goes back decades, before I was born. So I feel a little bit out of touch with what’s possible, what has been done, what failed before, what succeeded before. So I’m learning a lot about it as I go.