An Independent Game Developer’s Diary

I wonder how other indies manage their development time?

What I mean is how do they decide what needs to be done, whether they are on track for doing the correct tasks, and how do they choose what to do from day to day.

I know there have been discussions on IndieGamer Development forums about staying motivated. Now only having only started two weeks ago, I’m not having that problem yet, but I wonder if good planning might help in the future.

The method I’ve been using is a combination of eXtreme Programming and Scrum. Essentially I am working to week long iterations. At the end of each iteration, I aim to have a working game (or game like system), and I’m picking tasks to do within each iteration. I have a white board (actually a very cool glass whiteboard, only £8 from Ikea!) upon which I’ve written up the list of tasks.

(click to enlarge)

I have planned out some large scale tasks, aiming for about two a week for the next 12 weeks (thats the stuff to the left), and is very rough. However each week, I breakdown the tasks into much smaller tasks. As can be seen (or not) in this image, I had two large tasks this week, Scrolling and Turns.

I broke scrolling into the following mini-tasks

• Create Viewport (4 hours)
• Efficiency Algorithm (4 hours)
• Edge Detection (2 hours)
• Refactor Locations (8 hours)

On Monday mornings I take half an hour to an hour to break this weeks tasks down like this, and I write them both on the board, and in a spreadsheet.

E very morning I update the board, and for each task I do one of three things

1. Task hasn’t changed, leave it as is
2. Task has been completed, put a line through it
3. Task is partially done, I change the hours estimate to record how long there is left on this task

I then add a new column to the spreadsheet after that, with the new column of numbers. This means I can graph the total hours estimated going down and see if I’ve had a bad day.

I like this system, it’s very similar to how I worked at my previous workplace, with the whole team, and I’ve found it takes me about 10 minutes a morning to update, but gives me a good feeling come about wednesday when I cna look at the board and see half of the tasks with lines through them.

So how do you do it?

This entry was posted on Wednesday, August 9th, 2006 at 5:46 pm and is filed under Misc. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.