The Four Month Project

I finally decided to stop working on Tempus a few weeks ago. I realized that there were a few things that kept me from doing what I wanted. Namely, they were:

• I had been working on it for too long and I had too much feature creep in the game
• I was no longer inspired to create the game; I had no vision for it or for what it should be like when it was done
• I felt like I wasn't making any progress

In a nutshell, I felt like I had been working on the project so long that it had become stale to me. This was disappointing, because after participating in One Game a Month, I wanted to try working on a personal project that took longer than a month to make - I wanted to complete Tempus over the course of a year and finish at least a playable demo by winter.

But, things soon became apparent after I spent more than a month writing the serialization code for the game. I wasn't enjoying it anymore. I think Tempus was doomed to failure when I started because I wanted to do everything for the game and build everything from the ground up. I had scoped the project too large and I couldn't handle it. So, I decided to stop.

Instead, I'll be working on a different project that I think addresses the issues that plagued Tempus. This project is Glass Bubble.

Glass Bubble has four months to be made - longer than a month, shorter than a year. Specifically, I want to start on the 5th of July (I did) and end on November 1st, with 18 weeks of development. I will plan out what will happen each week, and I will give myself at least 8 hours to work on it every weekend, but to not plan more than 8 hours of work each week.

This way I can look back on what I'm doing and compare it to my plan for completing the game. I can get a sense for whether or not I'm on track and I can cut a feature away from the game if I need to.

This is the plan:

• Week 1 (7/5) - Implement hard shadows and movement for the player
• Week 2 (7/12) - Bring in dialog and utility code from past projects and implement parallax
• Week 3 (7/19) - Implement the dialog UI for the game
• Week 4 (7/26) - Implement the dialog UI for the game
• Week 5 (8/2) - Write dialog for the first two encounters in the game (Grim and Kelsi)
• Week 6 (8/9) - Write dialog for the next two encounters in the game (Pik and Daedor)
• Week 7 (8/16) - Write dialog for other minor characters in the first level
• Week 8 (8/23) - Create the main character assets
• Week 9 (8/30) - Create forest assets
• Week 10 (9/6) - Create Kelsi's assets
• Week 11 (9/13) - Create Pik's assets
• Week 12 (9/20) - Create Daedor's assets
• Week 13 (9/27) - Create Grim's and minor character assets
• Week 14 (10/4) - Create city assets
• Week 15 (10/11) - Create city assets
• Week 16 (10/18) - Make music for the game
• Week 17 (10/25) - Extra time in case one of the aforementioned items take longer than anticipated
• Week 18 (11/1) - Bugfixing and minor tweaks

Additionally, I will post a weekly dev blog after the week's work is completed (this will also help me to critically analyze my development progress). I haven't gotten around to making week one's entry yet, but I will be doing that one soon in a few days, before I start week two's work.

Hopefully this all goes over well! I'm excited and optimistic about the project. More info coming in week one's update.