A different approach

I was looking at my post the other day and thinking about the whole scheduling malarkey. So I have asked for some input from a friend and colleague. We are both lucky because I give him a lift to work every day and I get to pick his brains, so, I think it’s a fair deal.

He said that I really shouldn’t over plan things because due to my level of experience in software engineering it is likely that I’ll get a lot of things wrong. Even experienced engineers make mistakes and have to do a lot of rework. I should try a different approach.

So this is basically his advice. Look to your project and think about what you need it to do, and everything you think you might need in order to get that to happen. Plan those tasks, prioritize according to the dependencies and then start coding straight away. You will get results, and your project will move forward, there will be a lot of refactoring but there would be a lot of refactoring anyways because it’s unlikely that you will stick with the first implementation of any code that you write, and Get Cracking.

So I chose something I need to do. I need to have a spaceship on the screen that moves around, and can be targeted, attacked, destroyed and can fight back. Doesn’t seem much. But breaking down what I need to make this happen I came across a small mountain of work.

So far I have a pretty busy schedule that leads up to the end of April. In total I have:

• 4 Art Tasks: No big deal
• 1 Audio Task: No big deal
• 31 Code Tasks: Ahem…

And I can start working straight away. At least I already have a secondary viewport that draws my current target on in. Pretty neat… but I guess I’ll only put a video of it when I finish my March/April Sprint.