The Boring Stuff?

I got to a point of my little XNA project that I’m quite comfortable to set myself a deadline for completion. Two years. TWO YEARS??? Well… I am working on my own after all, and it’s a little but ambitious projects. 

Now, if I want to get this out of the door I need to set myself some deadlines… Let’s say, Complete my code by next March, have all the final Assets in game by next September, and have six months to fix bugs and polish.

It’s all fun and games when you are coding and you get visual improvements on the screen. There is a sense that things are moving forward. Up to this point I have been pretty much doing what I felt like doing. All important things that were needed in the final project but now I have reached a point when every time I want to sit down and do some work on it, I need to first spend about an hour reviewing the code I have already written trying to work out what my next step should be. And that’s wasting precious time. Especially because I might decide to work on something that isn’t as important than something else in the huge mountain of works there is to be done.

How big is the mountain? How many things do I have to do, what should I be working on now? The good thing about being working on the games industry is that I now have a pretty good picture of how game development works as a whole. And how much more work there is to be done than one actually would think there was, and how we go about managing the production cycles.

The big difference here is that I am on my own and I can’t do everything simultaneously like it’s done in the industry. But I need to take advantage of that. In the development process of a large game there is a lot of reworking, things that get changed, chucked away, designs that sprout out of nowhere in the middle of a milestone, and other things like that. Most of this is because things are done simultaneously and due to communication problems. Unless I get a split personality in the middle of the process communication with myself isn’t exactly a problem so when I tell myself I need these model to look like this, I will immediately understand what I mean and won’t spend two days working on something that does not please me. And I won’t do things simultaneously, which means it’s unlikely that things I change will have an unexpected effect, and if they do I can resolve it there an then. All and all it means that the project will move a lot slower but it should be leaner.

Basically, looking to the near future of the project there is little code work to be done, but lots of planning. Up until the end of the month I need to have:

Finished the design of the Mechanics and Systems.
Model the Code Structure
Schedule Code Tasks
Schedule the whole project.