Posted October 20, 2023 by Jummit
After reading “Hold off on proposing solutions” from Harry Potter and the Methods of Rationality I wanted to put a decent effort into planning. I did this in a couple of steps:
Pretty boring, but I’ll put it here for completeness:
Risk: Likelyhood x Impact = Score
Mitigation.
RSI: 2 x 3 = 6
Breaks, limited working hours, reminder to type slowly, physical exercises.
DNF (Did not finish): 2 x 3 = 6
Good planning, reflection, limited scope.
Risk overlooked: 3 x 2 = 6
Look out for possible risks during the week.
Codebase becomes unworkable: 2 x 2 = 4
ECS, good planning, limited scope.
Loose Interest: 2 x 2 = 4
Work on other projects, have endurance, the jam entry is the delayed gratification.
Data loss: 1 x 3 = 3
Online backups.
Illness: 1 x 2 = 2
Stay healthy.
Bad game idea: 1 x 2 = 2
Existing game, good execution.
Cartridge too big: 1 x 1 = 1
I can fall back to the PRO version.
I ended up with this:
4 hours each day, 40 hours in total (enough to make a game).
Two hour blocks, with pomodoro breaks.
Write down the goals in the morning, reflect on what worked and what didn’t in the blog post.
The things I need to do:
And the week schedule:
Day 2: Visual and gameplay design
Day 3: Make graphical assets and sounds
Day 4: List behaviours and data, try to get a good set
Day 5: Implement some the systems and components
Day 6: Rework set of behaviours and data
Day 7: Implement some the systems and components
Day 8: Improve AI
Day 9: Make cover, tutorial, description, itch.io page, tic-80 page
Day 10: buffer
As I have previously failed completing big projects because of stamina, I wanted to make a clear plan to prevent that.
Sleep enough, at regular hours.
Eat enough and healthy.
Exercise, go for walks.
Take regular breaks.
Keep RSI in mind.
Keep up motivation by working on other things as well.
After all of that, I surprisingly still had a lot of time left. I decided to give to create some assets and designs.
Here are the results:
And the unfinished circuit mat (game board):