Bill W:
Often, drivers will open games on their phone so they don’t ge bored out of their tree during slow times. I thought, why not give them a chance to enjoy games with other drivers? I always loved the ping pong game, and there has always been a richness of extra complecity n what seems like such a simple game. So I decided to incoorprate features, such as spin, multi-ball explosions, speed, and so on. and give users a chance to find someone who likes to play at their speed. Plus add an interactive chat so that players can tease and congratulate.
Chad G:
S2-03 is a good example of designing for a future feature without pretending the feature already exists.
We wanted the app eventually to support a social layer for drivers: public profiles, opt-in availability, game invitations, private messaging and a two-player Pong-style game. But the prompt explicitly required all of it to remain dormant behind a disabled feature flag for the initial release.
The interesting reasoning was social rather than technical. Pong was not primarily imagined as an esport. It was an icebreaker for people who often work alone – something to do during downtime that could make conversation with another driver less awkward. Profiles could use chosen display names and broad areas, not legal names or precise GPS locations, and discoverability was separate from simply being signed in.
By putting identity, presence, invitations, moderation and game-session concepts into the architecture early, we hoped to avoid a painful retrofit later while still keeping Beta 1 focused.
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