End of Week 1 working on Seed Magic and it has gone really great! I fit in a few extra bells and whistles on the game play implementation, without really getting off track. Overall I was really good at tracking time and staying in line with the plan. I outlined everything planned to get work on, broke them up into rough hour (and some half) chunks, and laid them out on a six week timeline.
It has helped to have a visualization of how much time I have, especially seeing the free space to act as a buffer shrink as I add things.
My schedule assumes a 10 hour minimum of work, and adds an extra 4 hour chunk to each week I can use to house some extra. The hope is to squeeze stuff out of that and into the free space, but I have the extra room if necessary.
The second week will have a focus on art and effect work, with just a little time carved out for the first spells. I’m looking forward to sitting down with a lot of solid time dedicated just to pixel art.
What I’d really like to do is think and talk about why this first week went well and how I can make the next five weeks of development go just as smooth. Traditionally, I think I’m technically proficient at the craft of “making video games” but there’s a huge and not-at-all uncommon gap between that and finishing a game, getting it out the door, and exchanging money with people who want to play that game. That all has to change, so the theme of this project is discipline.
First Discipline: Plan how much time will be spent and spend it. I outlined my project and laid it out into six 10 hour weeks, giving each week a 4 hour optional buffer to use. I worked for 12 hours this week, watching my time in a tracker and making sure I was putting in enough each day that it would add up by the end of the week. Keeping an eye on it and having a specific goal kept me on track.
Second Discipline: Don’t do things you didn’t plan to do. Sure, I embellished a little when I added a simple non-animated magic sparkle sprite that flies in a single arc from a match to the enemy when you deal damage, just so you can have an idea what’s going on, but that took like 10 minutes and it really helped, and didn’t go off the rails more than that. There were other tasks I came up with as necessary and simple abandoned when I saw myself get outside the planned goals of the week. Even if it looked approachable, sometimes even if I had already started some code, I just backed out and deleted that work, leaving an item in my backlog, instead of pushing other planned events of the timeline. I stayed focused.
Third Discipline: Moderate the completion of planned tasks. When I have a task on my todo list that says “Code Enemy Attacks” there’s a pretty wide range of how I can interpret that, and I have an estimate for an hour to do that in. What that means is the interpretation of “Code Enemy Attacks” is exactly what can fit in 60 minutes, because I keep myself in a position where I can stop when I hit that time and call the current state “done”. In this case, I implemented the damage first as numbers internally, then a health bar, then a little animation of the attack, etc. Each of these little steps was complete on its own, so at any point when the time ran out, I could ship that. By working in small iterations I can be sure I’m always ready to be done with something, because I make sure to never have a lot of work put into something not in a state that’s complete to some definition.
There’s a lot that can happen in the next five weeks. I definitely think I had a great week I’m really proud of, but I’m not naïve and I know I’ve had those kind of starts on other projects. The difference, I hope, is that those good starts were the outcome of hasty enthusiasm, where this time I’m working more with persistent dedication. Time will tell, of course, but for now I can guess that I’m going to do good.
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