Fitting in Game Development in a Full-Time Schedule
I had to get my car inspected this morning. I was stuck at a Jiffy Lube for about forty minutes, so I whipped out the laptop and began working on game development. Doing art / modeling tasks with a touchpad does NOT sound like fun. So opened up my list and looked at programming tasks remaining.

Ah-hah. The game needed an "invulnerable" mode ("god mode") for development and testing. Even though I'm getting pretty good at dodging the virtual bullets in the game, it's better to not have to worry about it when I'm actually trying to make sure animations are firing or whatnot.

I finished about five minutes before the mechanic came in to tell me my car was ready. One more task taken off the (long) list! I even included a HUD indicator to tell you when you are invincible, and tracked down a minor bug in my damage handling routine.

I'm not a productivity expert (perish the thought!), but if you are going to do part-time game development, the ONLY WAY you are going to make it work is to force it into your schedule everywhere it will fit. Steve Taylor has a blog about the "Ten Minute Method" (almost the only blog entry he's done, durn him! He's too busy writing games I guess) and I'd suggest this as a corollary.

Break your tasks up into things that CAN be done in only ten minutes. Or twenty. Or thirty. And work on them any chance you get. If for some reason your time runs out before you are done, take an extra thirty seconds to make a note to yourself as to where you left off - either as a comment in your code, or a "virtual sticky note" in the form of a text file on your desktop. Don't put off doing development work because you "don't have enough time." No, it's not going to be as productive as a big three-day-weekend game development binge, but still it is PROGRESS. And progress tends to yield more progress.

When I was working on Void War, I even took the little "spare" three or five minutes to just work on my task list, set goals, or maybe look up a subject online related to whatever I was working on (BSP trees, DirectX error messages, whatever). Granted, MOST of my development effort was done in big 4-hour blocks at night when the rest of the family had gone to bed. But every little bit counts.

Take advantage of those little bits.

Labels: productivity

- posted by The Rampant Coyote @ 10:39 PM (Permalink)