September 5, 2004

I ought to be ashamed of myself. Tomorrow, I turn in a requirements document for my Massive Heinous Senior Project that (you should perhaps brace yourself for this) wasn't funny at all. In fact, it was a little. boring. I thought I was supposed to pretend I was in an actual business where "8:24 AM - Frown on attempts at humor" often tops the managers' day planners. I mean, sure, I designed a logo that appears to be a full cow sandwiched within a hamburger bun (we are Medium Rare Productions), but other than that, there's not much to laugh at, or even slightly grin at, except maybe the fact that any of us considered the document attractive. So, of course, the two other teams would go on to produce requirements documents of such rollicking hilarity that several of the keyboards in the Massive Heinous Senior Project Lab are now completely coated in CS major drool.

What's really sad, however, is that the whole time I was writing I was thinking about what the requirements document ought to look like (that is, involving as much sarcasm as possible), and then restraining myself. Why, oh why, do I restrain myself? Possibly gnomes are at fault. But here's a glimpse at how the requirements document might have looked, if I'd let myself go just a little bit, or perhaps, to an insane degree.

-- Page 1 --

NOT THE ACTUAL
GAME TITLE

presented by

Blake Tryniewski
Duke Grain
Chris Guin
Doy Mance
Bloshua Wine*

*not our real names

-- Page 2 --

goal statement

Medium Rare Productions (Blake Tryniewski, Duke Grain, Chris Guin, Doy Mance, and Bloshua Wine for those of you too lazy to scroll up maybe five lines) hereafter enters into an agreement with Harding University (hereafter the Slavedriving End User) in order to design, implement, and achieve righteous domination over the other teams with Not the Actual Game Title, an entertainment program into which Medium Rare Productions agrees to pour perhaps thousands of man-hours into in order to provide, at most, twenty minutes of gaming satisfaction to thirty or so hapless testers, because in the end, it's still a board game that nobody's ever heard of.*

The game will be heavily slathered in layers upon layers of excessive colorful theming and neat graphical and sound gimmicks to hide the bare board game core from the end user, in the same manner as if we were dressing a Chihuahua in seventeenth-century garb, only that would be more subtle.

Medium Rare Productions will also implement a hugely sophisticated help and tutorial system to "walk the end user through" the rules as he plays, because, quite frankly, Medium Rare Productions does not trust the average end user to be much smarter than a bean bag, or any more willing to read the rules in text format.

Medium Rare Productions agrees to produce a piece of high quality entertainment software that goes above and beyond the call of duty in every conceivable way. "Because if we don't, we'll fail the class!" as our actual business slogan proudly states.

* I forget what it's called.

-- Page 3 --

user requirements

• Some kind of computer
• 256 MB 3D accelerated graphics card, because we trust that the kind of end user who actually owns such cards are nearly peeing in their end user pants at the thought of playing an actual board game that demands such graphical sophistication, as opposed to a Half Life mod of some kind

-- Page 4 --

unnecessary enhancements

• Medium Rare Productions assures the reader that they are not so stupid as to actually promise anything in this section.

-- Page 5 --

team members and assignment divvying up

• Chris Guin, as the noble and studly team leader, will oversee productions and maybe do some coding if he gets around to it. He solemnly promises to slather everything in ferocious sarcasm, whining to his friends about the project as necessary.
• Duke Grain will take command of the 3D graphics and user interface, spending entire lunar cycles in front of a lab computer until he wastes away into a pile of generic organic matter. This may cause the team some inconvenience.
• Blake "Spell Your Last Name For Me" Tryniewski will spend days researching what the rest of us learned in class because he is in a different major.
• Doy Mance will be happy to help after football practice is over, that is, sometime in late October.
• Blosh "Ua" Wine will spend days researching development tools that we will not actually be using, but we will not tell him until it is too late, ha ha!

-- Page 6 --

signatures

The undersigned hereby solemnly attest that they have lightly skimmed this document, for what it's worth, and that although Medium Rare Productions gave it its best, it is nowhere near as funny as Team 2's.*

_______________________________________________

*The undersigned also agree to give Medium Rare Productions a great deal of "bonus" points in the event of any perceived unfairness, hereafter defined as "any low grade." The undersigned also protests that because this is the fine print, he is actually "oversigned."

On second thought, maybe it's a good thing I didn't turn this version in.