An Independent Game Developer’s Diary

Yes! I got mentioned on GameProducer.Net

Now I still get girly gigles when I realise that people I respect mention me in their blogs. I mean it just all feels so unreal. It was only 5 weeks ago that I started my company, and it still hasn’t quite sunk in that I’m actually doing this. Risky and all, but this is all real!

He he.

I guess a progress update might be nice anyway, I’ll blog a bit tomorrow about the business side of things, because I’ve found some handy things come up recently.

The game is going well. Currently the game has

• Moving robots
• Shooting robots
• Explosions when robots get shot
• Shields, armour and differant guns that affect chance to hit
• Isometric view (mostly)
• A frontend menu system

The next things to do include, AI, mission end detection, the Robot Builder! (he he) and the email and attachment support, and then I’m back to iterating over my code, I need to improve most of the features above as well.

On non robot rumble side, I’m fleshing out my design ideas for Game 2, writing a website with the aim of getting some contract webdesign work so I can eat, and working with my artist freind to produce some very cool looking robots!

Anyway, Cheers Juuso for bringing a little smile and excitement into my life this morning. I needed that!

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?