Another amazing book that I have just finished (re)reading is: Getting Real by basecamp.

I was mentioning this book in my previous article Being Indie while working at a full-time job, and now that I have completely finished reading it again I have decided to write a post about this book.

Jason Fried is the founder and CEO of Basecamp, and as he stated on his Twitter bio he is a “Non-serial entrepreneur”. He is the co-author of several great books: rework, remote, It doesn’t have to be crazy at work, and well, of course, Getting Real.

The book Getting Real was written also by David Heinemeier Hansson (creator of Ruby on Rails) and Matthew Linderman.

Getting Real’s subtitle is: “The smarter, faster, easier way to build a successful web application”. I would say it could apply to anything related to the digital world, not only web applications.

For a game developer, like me, this book was an amazing source of inspiration. How you could build something faster and that could fit with what your audience is asking for.

Something close to what this book describes is sometimes called the Vertical Slice, in software and game development.

We won’t try to put everything inside our game and wait for ages before releasing it. We will build something that can be fun to play and appealing with the very first-time user experience. The focus will be only on a few parts of the game rather than something full of features and a huge amount of content.

This is also what we have on some Early Access games. It could help to see what the community of gamers think about your product get valuable feedback and improve your title before the final release. Some well known Early Access games are pushing this so far that after many years in early access they have still not reached a point to announce any release date. The most famous one is Star Citizen.

Some very interesting part of this book is about users feedback. There are interesting fact about how to handle all the inputs you receive from your community, your friends, your family or some random guy on the street that could say: “Hey change this color to pink because it’s the best color!” or “If you don’t have this BIG feature in your game, I will never play it!”. The odds are those guys are not your players and don’t know anything about your game. Say “No” to everything and any idea that you receive. If it keeps popping up and coming back to you in a different manner, maybe it’s time to address it. But don’t start adding it to Jira or any place like a Backlog, or else you will spend your days and weeks processing them and trying to see if each of those ideas makes sense or not for your product. It’s time-consuming and not efficient.

If you think “less is more”. If you are thinking of building something that could last forever, and not searching for the next big idea that could make you a billionaire in a few months. Do you want to build a sustainable business? This book is for you.

You can read it online here: Basecamp – Getting Real