Where I learned to build products
- Company
- Robonica
- Year
- 2007-2010
- Role
- Software design
My first job started with a classifieds ad for someone to make games like PlayStation 2. I'd just finished studying 3D animation, and I didn't know it yet, but I was walking into product.
The company was Robonica, in Centurion, and the game turned out to be a robot. Roboni-i was programmable, it had moods, and it could explore on its own. Ignore it for too long and it would wander off and sulk. Around it we built a whole world: a remote that took a different card for each game, game pieces you laid out as a playing field, multiplayer games, drag-and-drop software for programming the robot, and an online moon world with its own currency. We were a small South African team, backed by government technology funding, and we built all of it from nothing.
I designed the software. Every screen started as a pencil sketch on paper, and only once it held up did it become a prototype, and then the real thing.
We'd planned a set of games, and then we started play-testing. What really lit people up was playing against each other, together, with the score right there. So we changed direction. We built tournament software that read the data straight from the games running on the robots, and we moved the launch back a full year to get it right. That's where I learnt to watch people use what I'd made, instead of guessing what they'd do with it.
I saw it again after we launched, at the Rand Easter Show at Nasrec, where Robonica had a spot on the Popular Mechanics stand. Children came to the stand who'd only ever played soccer by kicking a ball around an open field. Then they found they could play a game like it with a remote-control robot, and watch the scoreboard go up. They lit up.
Roboni-i went on sale in the US in September 2009, at Toys"R"Us, Amazon and Barnes & Noble, and Wired, Engadget and IEEE Spectrum all wrote about it. Then the company ran out of runway. We'd shipped it, and it still didn't last.
I've spent years in payments since then. But every product I build still starts the way Roboni-i did, with a sketch, a prototype, and a person I can watch using it.